Black Hawk Down

“Right now we're not going to be able to move, not with all these wounded.”

This was frustrating news for Captain Miller. Nobody had clearly sorted out who was in charge on the ground. If some part of Steele's force moved just to the end of their block, they could better cover the wide alley that ran between them. Harrell refused to order Steele to make the move.

-If you stay separated I cannot support you as well, Harrell told Steele. You're the guy on the ground and you have to make the call.

Steele had made his call, and that was that. When one of the operators again offered Steele his headset so the captain could confer directly with Miller, Steele waved him away. So there were effectively two separate forces pinned down now, and their commanders were not talking to each other.

If Steele wouldn't budge, Miller would at least move his own men. As the D-boys prepared to leave, Steele was angry. If they moved out, it would more than halve the number of able-bodied men at his position. He felt it didn't make sense, and regarded Miller's move as a kind of “Fuck you” directed at him and his men. But he did nothing to stop it.

The operators lined up in the courtyard. When the first group of four dashed out into the night, the whole neighborhood erupted. It sounded like the city of Mogadishu had sprung viciously back to life. Within seconds, all four of the D-boys came flying back into the courtyard, tripping over the same metal rim at the bottom of the door that had tripped Steele up early in the afternoon. They wound up in a heap on the ground, their gun barrels clinking together as they untangled.

Relieved that none had been injured, Steele watched them regroup with sober satisfaction.

-Hey, Captain, we've got to get Smith out. He's getting worse, came another radio call from Perino.

“Roger,” Steele said.

He knew it was hopeless, but he felt he had a responsibility to Smith to at least try. He tried the command net once more. He called up to Harrell.

“Romeo Six Four, this is Juliet Six Four. Our guy is fading fast. There's a wide intersection suitable for LZ [landing zone] directly outside.”

-Can you mark it, Juliet? Is it big enough to bring in a Hawk?

Steele said it was, and that they could mark it. He waited a few moments for a decision. He could hear the frustration in Harrell's voice when it returned.

-We put a Hawk in there to resupply and it got shot so bad the bird is unusable. I think if we try to bring another MH [MH-60, a Black Hawk], we are just going to have another bird go down on the ground, over.

“This is Juliet Six Four. Roger. What is the ETA on the armored vehicles?”

There was no answer for a few minutes. Steele called back, knowing he was pushing.

“Romeo, this is Juliet.”

-Go ahead, Juliet.

“Roger. Do you have an ETA for me?”

-I am working on it now. Stand by.

Harrell's irritation showed.

Steele then heard Harrell pleading with the JOC.

-We've got two critical pax [Carlos Rodriguez was also in critical condition] that are going to die if we do not get them out of that location. I don't think that it is secure enough to bring in a bird. Can you get an ETA for the ground reaction force, over?

Then, minutes later.

-If the QRF does not get there soon, there will be more KIAs [Killed in Action] from previously received WIAs [Wounded in Actions. Get the one-star [Brigadier General Greg Gile, commander of the 10th Mountain Division] to get his people moving!

From the commanders' perspective, other than the plight of Smith and Rodriguez, it made little sense to rush back out into the fray. Given the roadblocks and ambushes that had turned back the earlier convoys, the commanders were not taking any chances with the next one. They were going back out in major force, with hundreds of men led by Pakistani tanks and Malaysian armored personnel carriers. But it was taking time to assemble and organize this force. Harrell was told it would be at least an hour (it would actually take three hours) before they were ready to move. Harrell reported back:

-It is going to be an hour before they get in there. I don't think they will be able to get there within an hour.

Steele told him that an hour was too long. Air commander Matthews explained:

-Roger. I want to try to put a bird in but I'm afraid if I do that we are just going to lose another aircraft, over.

Nobody wanted to write off the two young soldiers. Back at the JOC, the generals again considered landing a helicopter to take out Smith and Rodriguez. The pilots were ready to attempt it. Miller and Steele were asked again if they could adequately secure a landing zone to get a Black Hawk in and out. Perino walked out and consulted with Sergeant Howe, who told him a chopper could get

in, but it damn sure wouldn't get back out.

Captain Miller's Delta command post was consulted. He answered:

-We are willing to try and secure a site, but there are RPGs all over the place. It is going to be really hard to get a bird in there and get it out. I'm afraid that we are just going to lose another bird.

Harrell delivered the reluctant verdict.

-We are going to have to hold on the best we can with those casualties and hope the ground reaction force gets there on time.

Steele sadly passed this word to Perino. “It's just too hot,” Steele told him.

Not long afterward, Smith started hyperventilating, and then his heart stopped. Medic Schmid went into full emergency mode. He tried CPR for several rotations, compressions and ventilations, then he injected drugs straight into the Ranger's heart. It was no use. He was gone.

Harrell was still pushing hard for the ground rescue force.

-We've got guys that are going to die if we don't get them out of there; and I can't get a bird in, over.

It was at about eight o'clock when Steele got another radio call from Perino

-Don't worry about the medevac, sir. It's too late.

Steele put out the news on the command net.

-One of the critical WIAs has just been KIA.

Medic Schmid was shattered by Smith's death. The corporal had gone from a fully alert, strong Ranger complaining, “I'm hurt,” to a dead man in the medic's hands.

Schmid was the chief medic at his location, so he had other men to attend to and no time to brood, but Smith's prolonged agony and death would haunt him for years afterward. Still covered with Smith's blood, he went to work on the others. He felt drained, terribly frustrated, and defeated. Was it his fault? Should he have found someone and tried to set up a direct transfusion early on, back when he expected rescue was imminent? He went back over every step he had taken in treating Smith's wound, second guessing himself, blaming himself for every decision that had turned out wrong and had wasted time.

Finally, he did his best to make peace with it. Schmid believed if he could have gotten Smith back to the base, his life would have been saved. He wasn't certain of it, but that was his gut feeling.

Steele, too, was shaken by news of Smith's death. He knew nothing yet of Pilla, nor of any of his men who had taken off with the lost convoy and been killed. Cavaco, Kowalewski, and Joyce. He'd seen Fillmore shot dead, but Smith was one of his own. He'd never lost a man before. Steele thought of them as his men, not the army's or the regiment's. His. They were his responsibility to train and lead and keep alive. Now he was going to be sending one of them home, somebody's precious young son, in a flag-draped coffin. He walked back to quietly tell Sergeant Watson. They decided not to tell the other guys yet.

Goodale was in high spirits for somebody with a second hole through his ass. He showed off his canteen with a bullet hole through it. He felt no pain from the round that had passed through his thigh and left a nasty wound on his right buttock. It wasn't very dignified. When Floyd had come huffing in after all the men had been waved into the courtyard from the street, he took one look at the medic stuffing Curlex up Goodale's exit wound and said, “You like taking it up the ass, eh, Goodale?” In the same back room was Errico, a machine gunner who had been wounded in both biceps manning his gun, and Neathery, who'd been wounded in the upper arm when be took over for Errico. Neathery was distressed. The bullet had damaged both bicep and tricep and he couldn't make his right arm work at all.

One of the wounded men was crying, starting to freak out “We're going to die here!” he kept repeating. “We're never going home!”

“Just shut the fuck up,” said Sergeant Randy Ramaglia. The man fell silent.

Worst off was Lechner, who was now on a morphine drip. When Sergeant Ramaglia first came in the dark back room he flopped down into what felt like a warm puddle. Then he realized it was Lechner's blood. The room smelled of blood, a strong musky stink with a faint metallic tinge, like copper, an odor none of them would forget.

Watson came back at one point looking for more ammunition. They were down to about half of the supply they'd carried in.

“I have some flashbangs if you want them,” said Goodale.

“No, Goodale, I don't want flashbangs,” he said with gentle scorn. “We're not scaring them anymore. We're going to kill them now.”

Like the rest of the guys, Goodale was frustrated with how long it was taking the rescue convoy to come. He'd ask Steele for an ETA, the captain would give him one, then that time would pass and Goodale would ask again.

Steele would give him a new time, then that one would pass.

“Atwater,” he shouted out to Steele's radioman. “Look, I promised my fiancée I'd call her back tonight and if I don't I'm really gonna be in some deep shit, so we've got to get out of here.”

Atwater just gave him a pained grin.

“Hey, you motherfuckers better all quiet down in there,” came the voice of the one of D-boys. “All it takes is one RPG through that back window and you're all fucked.”

Word whispered around about Smith.

“Corporal Smith? What happened to Smith?” asked Goodale.

“He's dead.”

The news hit Goodale hard. He and Smith were close. Both were smart-alecky, wiseass guys, always ready with a stinger, but Smith was the best. He always kept the guys laughing. Just before they got called up for this thing, Smith had confided in Goodale, “I've got this girl. I think I'm gonna marry her.” They'd had a detailed discussion about ring buying, something Goodale had just gone through for Kira. Smith's decision to pop the question had brought them closer. It had moved them to a more serious level of manhood than the swaggering young cocksmen around them. They'd spent a lot of time together in the hangar playing Risk or just shooting the shit. Smitty was dead?

Private George Siegler guarded the Somalis whom they had found in the house. They had been herded into the back corner room, a bedroom. There was a bed and a night table. The baby-faced soldier, who looked no older than fifteen, trained his M-16 on the two woman, a man, and four children. The adults were all on their knees. The youngest of them, a hugely pregnant woman, was crying. The others had been flex-cuffed, but not this woman, who couldn't hold the baby with her hands tied. She kept indicating with her hands that she was thirsty, so Siegler gave her his canteen. The children were all crying at first. The older ones looked to be between six and ten. One was an infant. In time the children stopped crying. So did the pregnant woman after he gave her water. They couldn't communicate, but Siegler hoped she understood they meant her no harm.

It got quieter and quieter as the night wore on. So long as they showed no light there was no shooting into the courtyard. Earlier, bullets had been coming through the open door and popping great divots in the concrete lattice-work in back, but now that had stopped. Specialist Kurth relieved Siegler of the prisoners after a few hours. He sat sweat-soaked and thirsty. Earlier, when they'd taken off on the mission, Kurth had felt like taking a leak but didn't, figuring they'd be back inside of an hour or so. He had ended up lying on his side out in the road behind the tin shack, urinating while gunfire snapped and popped around him, thinking, This is what I get.

This whole terrifying experience was having an effect on Kurth that he didn't fully understand. When he had been out on the street, crouched behind a rock that was nowhere near big enough to provide him cover, he'd thought about a lot of things. His first thought was to get the hell out of the army. Then, pondering it more as bullets snapped over his head and kicked up clods of dirt around him, he reconsidered. I can't get out of the army. Where else am I going to get to do something like this? And right there, in that moment, he decided to reenlist for another four years.

It grew quieter every hour as the night wore on. They kept getting situation reports, “sitreps,” from the air force guy up the street monitoring the various radio nets. The convoy was just a half hour away. Then, forty-five minutes later, “the convoy's an hour away.” You could hear ferocious shooting off in the distance as the rescue force finally moved out. Kurth was cotton-mouthed. They all were terribly thirsty. The taste of dust and gunpowder was in their mouths and their tongues were sticky and thick. Nothing in this world would taste as sweet as a cold bottle of water.

Every once in a while a Little Bird would come roaring in low and there would be a frenzy of shooting and loud explosions, and the brass from the bird's gun would clatter off the tin roof and rain into the courtyard. Then it would get so quiet again Kurth could hear himself breathing and the steady, hurried beat of his heart.

-11-

Specialist Waddell never actually got to go indoors with the rest of the men. When darkness came and everyone moved inside, Lieutenant DiTomasso told him to pull security at the west side of the hole that had been made by the falling Black Hawk. From where he lay behind some rubble, Waddell was looking out beyond the chopper's bent tail boom. Sergeant Barton curled up at the other side of the hole, pointing his weapon east past the front of the bird.

Earlier in the afternoon, Waddell had been terrified they wouldn't get out before dark. But by dusk he was rooting for the sun to finish going down. It seemed to take forever. He figured once it was dark the shooing would die down and they could breathe easier. He watched the Little Birds scream in doing gun runs on the alley west, showering him with brass casings. Their rockets literally shook the ground. They made a sound like a giant piece of Velcro ripping open, and then there would be the flash and tremendous blast. The fact that it was so close felt good. That's where he wanted them. Close.

One of the D-boys stripped down and climbed back into the helicopter and fished out some extra SAW ammunition for Waddell and Barton and found a pair of NODS, which Waddell got. With the night vision on he could see all the way out past the big intersection west and use the laser-aiming device, which gave him a much better feeling. The little green Fiat that had so ably served as cover across the intersection for Nelson, Barton, Yurek, and Twombly was shot full of holes. Waddell could hear the radio keep promising to send out the rescue column. They were going to be there in twenty minutes. Then, an hour later, in forty minutes. After a while it got to be a joke. “They're on their way!” guys would say, and laugh. When the big column did start to move across the city about a half hour before midnight, its tanks and armored personnel carriers, trucks and Humvees, he could hear them miles away. The convoy must have either been in terrific fighting or was basically lighting up everything in its path, because Waddell could track its movements by the sound of gunfire and by the way the sky lit up over it. He didn't think about the danger or the chances of being overrun and killed. He thought about stupid things. He was scheduled to take a physical fitness test the next day and wondered if, when they got back, they'd still make him take it. He asked Barton.

“Hey, Sergeant, am I going to have to take a P.T. test tomorrow?”

Barton just shook his head.

Waddell thought about the Grisham novel he'd been reading before they left. He couldn't wait to finish that book. Wouldn't it be just his luck to get killed and never finish the last few pages?

Every thirty minutes or so during the night Barton would call over quietly, “You okay?” If Waddell hadn't heard from him in a while he'd call over to him, “Sergeant, you okay?” Like either of them was going to go to sleep. Toward the middle of the night the shooting stopped and during certain stretches the Little Birds weren't making runs and it got very still. That's when he could hear the relief column off in the distance. Waddell was one of the few Rangers who had actually brought a canteen full of water with him instead of stuffing his pouch with ammo, so he handed over his canteen and it was passed around greedily.

When are we gonna get the fuck out of here? That was what Specialist Phipps wanted to know. He was in a small, smoky, dusty back room with the rest of the wounded in the building adjacent to the crashed helicopter, his back and his right calf aching from shrapnel wounds, listening to the sounds of shooting and blasts outside, wondering when some wild-eyed Sammy was going to bust in and blow him away. He had no idea what was going on. Specialist Gregg Gould was in there with him. Gould had taken some shrapnel to his butt, so he looked pretty ridiculous with his bandaged ass stuck up in the air, talking on and on about his girlfriend and how much he missed her and how he couldn't wait to see her again when he got home ... all of which further depressed Phipps, who had no girlfriend.

“Everything is gonna be cool. Man, when we get out of here I'm gonna drink me some beer,” Phipps said, trying to move Gould off the topic. It didn't work.

Specialist Nick Struzik was in there. He'd been shot in the right shoulder. Phipps had seen him bleeding up against the stone wall outside earlier, not long before he'd been hit, and remembered being shocked by it, as though somebody had slapped him. Struzik was the first of his buddies he saw injured. Staff Sergeant Mike Collins was in really bad shape. He'd gotten tagged with a round in his right leg that had shattered both fibula and tibia. The bullet had entered just below the kneecap and come out the back side of his leg, mangling it. Collins was in some serious pain and had bled a lot. Phipps figured sadly that ol' Sergeant Collins probably wouldn't make it. He couldn't believe they'd all left their NODS behind. The NODS had always given them that cocky we're-here-to-kick-ass feeling on previous night missions because it's one hell of an advantage when you can see the motherfuckers and they can't see you. Talk about an awesome lesson learned. They all took sips from the IV bags because they were so thirsty, just to wet their mouths. It tasted slimy but at least it was wet. Then, after the resupply bird came in, they all got a few sips of water.

When it was clear they would be staying longer, Sergeant Lamb took Sergeant Ron Galliette with him and explored all the doors around the inner courtyard. Behind one door they kicked open were two women. One very old, and three babies. The younger woman wanted to leave. She was just a teenager, maybe sixteen, and looked too tiny and thin to have borne the baby she clutched so tightly. She wore a brilliant blue robe with gold trim. The baby was wrapped in the same colors. She kept moving toward the door. Lamb told Sergeant Yurek to keep watch on her. Every time Yurek looked away she would move to the door again. He would hold up his rifle and she would sit back down. Yurek tried to talk to her.

“Look, if we were going to do anything to hurt you we would have done it by now, so just calm down,” he said, but it was clear that she understood not a word.

Yurek talked to her anyway. He told her that she was far safer for the time being indoors than out. All she had to do was sit tight. As soon as they could leave, they'd be gone. When she made another move to the door he used his rifle to push her back into the corner.

“No, no, no! You need to stay here,” he said, trying to frighten her into staying put. The woman argued back with him with words he didn't understand.

There was a spigot on the wall with the top broken off, and water was dripping steadily from it. Yurek collected some in his dry canteen and handed it to her. She turned her head and refused to take it from him.

“Be that way,” he said.

Lamb counted fifteen wounded, along with the body of Super Six One copilot Donovan Briley. They needed more space, so they placed a small charge on a wall in the back. The stone and mortar were so flimsy that most walls you could just push down, so this charge blew a nice big hole about four feet high and two feet wide. It scared everyone when it went off, particularly the Somali woman Yurek was guarding. She went apoplectic. It even scared Twombly, who'd set the thing. He thought he had a thirty-second fuse on the charge and it was only twenty seconds, so he'd jumped a foot when it blew. The new hole opened into the room off the block's central courtyard, where Perino had originally been, so DiTomasso's unit and Perino's had finally, inadvertently, linked up. The shock of the explosion sent more of the outside wall tumbling down on Waddell and Barton out by the crashed helicopter.

Nelson was so deaf he didn't even hear the blast. His ears just rang constantly, ever since Twombly had fired his SAW right in his face. Nelson surveyed the carnage around him and felt wildly, implausibly, lucky. How could he not have been hit? It was hard to describe how he felt... it was like an epiphany. Close to death, he had never felt so completely alive. There had been split seconds in his life when he'd felt death brush past like when another fast-moving car veered from around a sharp curve and just missed hitting him head-on. On this day he had lived with that feeling, with death breathing right in his face like the hot wind from a grenade across the street, for moment after moment after moment, for three hours or more. The only thing he could compare it to was the feeling he found sometimes when he surfed, when he was inside the tube of a big wave and everything around him was energy and motion and he was being carried along by some terrific force and all he could do was focus intently on holding his balance, riding it out. Surfers called it The Green Room. Combat was another door to that room. A state of complete mental and physical awareness. In those hours on the street he had not been Shawn Nelson, he had no connection to the larger world, no bills to pay, no emotional ties, nothing. He had just been a human being staying alive from one nano-second to the next, drawing one breath after another, fully aware that each one might be his last. He felt he would never be the same. He had always known he would die someday, the way anybody knows that they will die, but now its truth had branded him. And it wasn't a frightening or morbid thing. It felt more like a comfort. It made him feel more alive. He felt no remorse about the people he had shot and killed on the street. They had been trying to kill him. He was glad he was alive and they were dead.

When they moved the wounded into the bigger room cleared out by Twombly's charge, Sergeant Collins had to be passed through the hole on a stretcher. To get him through they had to strap him down and tilt the stretcher sideways. Collins protested as they readied him for this move.

“Guys, I've got a broken leg!”

“I'm sorry,” Lamb told him. “We've got to get you through.”

Collins screamed with pain as they passed him to the men on the other side.

They moved the body of Bull Briley back on a litter. Nelson had seen Briley playing cards and laughing in the hangar earlier that day. His head had been cut open in the crash, sliced from ear to ear just beneath his chin. His body was still warm and sweaty but it had turned a sickly gray.

The slit through his head was an inch wide and had stopped bleeding. When they lifted his short, thick body on the litter the top of his head flopped back grotesquely. Lamb remembered seeing him running wearing Spandex shorts, a powerful man. Jesus, this is a sad day. When they'd worked him through the hole, Lamb climbed through and pulled Briley's body off the litter and put it up against the wall. The pilot's head hit the wall with a mushy thud that sickened Lamb. He flattened him out so that when rigor set in the body would not be folded at the waist.

Abdiaziz Ali Aden waited in darkness. The Rangers moved through his house. Through the small opening the helicopter had smashed in the roof he could see stars. The Rangers had hung red lamps out on the trees and on top of the houses. He had never seen lights like these. Gunfire was still loud out in the streets, coming from all directions. Helicopters swooped down low and rattled the rooftop with their falling shells. He could hear the Americans inside talking to the helicopters on their radios, directing their fire.

He wasn't sure which was more dangerous, to stay in the house with all of the Rangers on the other side of the wall, or to risk being shot running away through the night. He debated until the sound of the shooting died off, and decided to leave.

He pulled himself up to the top of an outer wall and jumped down to the alley. There were four people dead where he landed, two men, a woman, and a child. He ran and had only gone a short distance when a helicopter came roaring down behind him and bullets kicked up the dirt and bounced off the walls. He kept his head down and kept on running and was surprised he was not hit.

Tim Wilkinson, the PJ, watched over the wounded men off Captain Miller's courtyard across Marehan Road. Wilkinson sat in the doorway to the yard with a handgun. There were only occasional pops of gunfire. Now and then a Little Bird would come roaring down and light up the sky out the window.

Stebbins lit a match for a cigarette and Wilkinson, startled, wheeled around with his handgun.

“Just lighting a butt, Sergeant.”

There was a moment of silence, then both men grinned, thinking the same thought.

“I know, I know,” said Stebbins. “It could be hazardous to my health, right?”

-12-

Late in the night, Norm Hooten and the other D-boys, teams led by Sergeants First Class John Boswell and Jon Hale, along with a crew of Rangers headed by Sergeant Watson, left Captain Steele's southernmost courtyard and ducked into the narrow alley against its north wall, where Fillmore's body had been placed late in the afternoon. They had decided things were quiet enough for them to move as Captain Miller had wanted, into the corner building at the north end of their block. From there they could cover the wide east-west alleyway that separated the two pinned-down forces. The move left Steele in the courtyard with the wounded and only four or five able-bodied men, but the others weren't going far.

None of the Rangers was eager to go. One, a sergeant, flat out refused to leave the courtyard, even after Steele issued him a direct order. The man had just withdrawn. He protested something had scratched his eye. He was told to just get back and help with the wounded.

Sergeants Thomas and Watson followed the D-boys out into the night, trailed by Floyd, Kurth, Collett, and several other men. Floyd found a dead donkey on the side of the street just outside the door and crouched down behind it. The D-boys had gone up the alleyway and climbed into the corner building through a window that was only about three feet from the ground. By the time Floyd entered the alley, they had moved Fillmore's body in through the window.

Floyd tripped over something. He felt down and found Fillmore's CAR-15. The dried blood on it flaked off in his hands. He also found Fillmore's helmet with its headset radio and some of his other gear. He was gathering it up when Watson leaned out the window.

“What the fuck are you doing, Floyd? Quit playing. Get your ass through this window!”

Floyd had a hard time climbing through carrying all that gear. Watson gave him a pull and he landed in a space much larger than the one where Captain Steele and the others were. Fillmore's body was laid out in the middle in the moonlight. The D-boys had flex-cuffed the dead operator's arms down by his sides and his feet together to make him easier to carry. Across the alley from the window they had entered was another on the wall that divided them from the wounded next door. They smashed the shutters so they could more easily talk back and forth.

The D-boys set infrared strobes around the new space to mark it for the helicopters. Floyd searched the courtyard and found a full fifty-five-gallon drum under a dripping spigot. He sniffed at it first to see if it was gasoline, then he stuck his finger in and licked it. It was water. Kurth and the rest of the men had been sternly warned about drinking the local water. Nothing will make you sicker quicker, the docs had said. Well, Kurth decided, to hell with the docs. If he got sick, fine, he'd deal with that later. He filled his canteen and swallowed just enough to wet his throat.

Then he and Sergeant Ramaglia, who was in the room across the alley, began passing canteens back and forth on a broomstick. Ramaglia rounded up all the empties he could find, passing the stick through the holder on the plastic cap that screwed on the top of the canteen. One by one, Floyd filled the canteens from the big drum.

Then he and Collett sat for a long time and talked in whispers. The D-boys had all the windows and doorways covered, so there was nothing for them to do. The moon was up, casting soft light over Fillmore's body in the middle of the courtyard. Collett kept checking his watch. Floyd poked around the courtyard, his pants flapping open around his bare middle. On the ground next to his boot he found a brand-new dustcase for an M-16.

“Hey, Collett, look at this 'ere.”

They'd been told all the Sammies had were beat-up old weapons. This one still had the packing grease on it.

Collett was feeling bored. He couldn't believe it, bored in a combat zone? How could that happen? The whole scene was weird, too weird for belief. Nobody would ever believe this shit back home. They listened to the gun runs overhead and to the approaching roar of weaponry as the giant rescue convoy fought its way in.

“Hey, Floyd.”

“Yeah.”

“I've got an idea.”

“What?”

“Wanna get a Combat Jack?”

Floyd couldn't believe his ears. Collett was suggesting they both beat off. This was a running joke with the Rangers, getting a “jack” in exotic places. Guys would brag about getting a Thailand Jack, or an Egypt Jack, or a C-5 Jack.

They both laughed.

“Collett, you're fuckin' high, man. Yer crazier 'n hell,”

Floyd said.

“No, man. Think about it. You would definitely be the first kid on your block. How many people can say they got one of those, huh?”

-13-

From overhead, the commanders watched the contested neighborhood through infrared and heat-sensitive cameras that sketched the blocks in monochrome. They could see crowds of Somalis moving around the perimeter in groups of a dozen or more, and kept hitting at them with helicopters. Aidid's militia was trucking in fighters from other parts of the city. The Little Birds made wall-rattling gun runs throughout the night. One of the birds shot at a Somali carrying an RPG who must have been toting extra rounds on his back. They placed a seventeen-pound rocket on him, which killed him and must have blown the extra rounds, because he went up like a Roman candle. When the chopper went back to refuel they found pieces of the man's body pancaked on their windshield.

Sergeant Goodale, lying with his wounded butt cheek off the ground, had resumed the job of coordinating gun runs from inside Captain Steele's courtyard. He couldn't see anything from where he sat, but be acted as a clearinghouse for all the other radio operators calling in fire. He decided which location needed the help most and relayed it up to the command bird.

Late in the evening he got word that two very large forces of Somalis were moving from south to north.

For the first time, Steele felt a stab of panic. Maybe we're not going to make it out of here. If a determined Somali force stormed the entrance to the courtyard, he and his men would kill a lot of them but probably couldn't stop them. He moved around making sure all of his men were awake and ready. He was kicking himself now for having let his men rope in without carrying bayonets, another item called for in the tactical standing procedures but which they had jettisoned to save weight. Who would have thought they'd need bayonets? Steele poked his head in the back room where Goodale was with the rest of the wounded, and informed him with grim humor:

“If you see somebody coming through this doorway and they're not yelling 'Ranger! Ranger!' you go ahead and shoot 'im because we're all out here dead.”

Goodale was shocked. The quiet had lulled him into a false sense of safety. He reasoned with himself. Okay, I might die here. I'd rather not but if I do, then that's what's supposed to happen and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. And he thought about what a terrible thing it was to have turned over responsibility for his life, his very existence, to the U.S. government, and that because of it he might be breathing his last breaths in this shithole back room, on this backstreet dirt floor in Mogadishu-fucking Somalia. He thought about how much he'd wanted to go to war, to see combat, and then he thought about all those great war movies and documentaries he'd seen about battles. He knew he'd never see another of those films and feel the same way about it. People really get killed. He found the best way to accept his predicament was to just assume he was dead already. He was dead already. He just kept on doing his job.

One block up, Sergeant Yurek was now positioned at a window peering east down the crash alley. It was sketched in soft shades of blue, the pale earth of the alley, the thickets of cactus and a wall about eight feet high with a fence just beyond it, no more than two car-lengths away. Yurek tried to sit as quietly as he could, figuring he'd hear somebody coming in before he'd see them. Then he saw the fence shake. He brought his M-16 up to his shoulder and drew a bead on the top of the fence as first one, and then another Sammy lightly pulled themselves up and then squatted on the adjacent wall, evidently looking for a place to jump down. This is getting too easy. One of the men spotted Yurek just before the sergeant squeezed the trigger. He had just enough time to begin a shout and reach for his weapon before Yurek's rounds blew him and the other backward off the wall. One of the men's weapons dropped on Yurek's side. He heard a commotion on the other side and then it was quiet again.

Looking out on the main road, Sergeant Howe still felt boxed in. He'd been stuck in a bad position, and for the first time he began to feel like he might not make it out of here alive.

The Somalis bad been sending three- to six-man teams down the alleys, probing their positions, trying to figure out exactly where they were. Howe could see these men and knew exactly what they were doing. One put his weapon around the corner and fired toward Miller's position across the street, then waited, hoping to see muzzle flashes to guide his shooting. When he saw none he edged around the corner. Howe decided to let him move well down the street in front of his position before shooting him, because if he shot the man and didn't kill him, he could return to point out Howe's position. Then they'd be a fat target for an RPG. Just as he prepared to fire, two D-boys across the road did and dropped the man. He did not get back up. At the same time they lit up a group of five Somalis preparing to move around the corner. Wounded, these men dragged themselves back up the street.

The quiet was in some ways more unnerving than the early din of battle. It was hard not to imagine large groups of Sammies lining up just around the corners. If there was a sudden rush from a large enough group, Howe felt, they could all be overrun. He began preparing a checklist for himself, the steps he would take in his final flight. He was going to take as many of them with him as was humanly possible. He still had six or seven magazines left for his CAR-15, along with his .45 and some shotgun ammo. He would shoot his rifle until it ran out of ammo, then the shotgun, then his pistol, and finally he would use his knife. Hopefully he'd find an enemy weapon to pick up.

Howe called together his team and told them to hold their fire on any Somalis until they were fully committed down the street, as he had been doing. They were all to conserve ammo and pick their shots with care. All of the other operators would radio whenever they used their weapons, telling each other what they shot at and where, and whether they hit where they aimed. It helped keep track of emerging trouble spots. The night had reached a critical juncture.

The Little Birds took care of the two large elements of approaching Somalis. Goodale heard one of the helicopters come screaming down Marehan Road and after the rattle of its guns and satisfying boom! of a rocket, he shouted,

“Make that one large element!”

Another gun run eliminated the second threat.

Sergeant Bray, the air force combat controller at Miller's position, asked for a gun run on the two-story house adjacent to their courtyard. The building overlooked them and had a separate entrance around the corner. If there were Somalis inside that house, they'd be able to shoot right down at them. The building was adjacent to the Delta command post courtyard and no more than twenty yards in front of Howe's position, which meant hitting it from the air without hurting any of the Americans on the ground would take one hell of a shot. Howe's men marked the building with lasers for the Little Bird pilot, who radioed down to ask if they were sure they wanted his miniguns firing that close. From the air, it was like trying to paint a thin line between two friendly positions.

“Keep your heads down,” the pilot warned.

His fire was right on the mark. Watching the miniguns tear the house apart, Howe turned to one of his team-mates and said, “Don't try this at home!”

Some time later, two Somalis came walking down the middle of the street as though out for a stroll. The moon was high now and lit the scene about half as bright as a cloudy afternoon. The men were spaced about forty yards apart. Howe watched the first walk down past his position. He tried to put his infrared cover on his gun light, and for a moment accidentally shone the white light out the door. He watched the first man double back, looking for where the flash had originated. Howe pulled out his .45. He didn't want to shoot the man with his rifle, because there were D-boys in the building directly across the street, and the bullets would likely pass right through him and on toward them. He also knew the muzzle flash from either rifle or handgun would be clearly visible to the second man. Howe radioed for one of his men to shoot the guy as soon as he passed out of the perimeter. As the man moved on, one of the men across the street shot him in the right lower back.

The man spun around with a startled look and was immediately hit by four more bullets that knocked him flat. Howe was disgusted that it had taken so many rounds to drop the man. The second Somali walked down the same way minutes later and was also shot dead.

By midnight the rescue convoy was getting close. The men pinned down listened to the low rumble of nearly one hundred vehicles, tanks, APCs (armored personnel carriers), and Humvees. The thunderclap of its guns edged ever closer. After a while, the rhythm of its shooting sounded like an extended drum solo in a rock song, very heavy metal. It was the wrathful approach of the United States of America, footsteps of the great god of red, white, and blue.

It was the best fucking sound in the world.

N.S.D.Q.

1

Michael Durant heard the guns of the giant rescue convoy roaring into the city. The injured Black Hawk pilot was flat on his back bound with a dog chain on a cool tile floor in a small octagonal room with no windows. Air, moonlight, and sounds filtered in through a pattern of crosses cut high in the upper third of the concrete walls. He tasted dust in the air and he smelled of blood and gunpowder and sweat. The room had no furniture and only one door, which was closed.

When the angry mob had closed over him, he thought he was going to die. He still did not know the fate of the three other men on his crew, copilot Ray Frank and crew chiefs Tommy Field and Bill Cleveland, or of the two D-boys who had tried to protect them. Durant did not know those men's names.

He had passed out when the mob carried him off. He'd felt himself leaving his body, watching the scene from outside himself, and at the worst of the chaos and terror it had calmed him. But the feeling hadn't lasted. He'd come to when he was thrown into the back of a flatbed truck with a rag tied around his head, surprised to still be alive and expecting at any moment to die. He was driven around. The truck would go and then stop, go and then stop. He guessed it was about three hours after the crash when they'd brought him to this place, removed the rag, and wrapped his hands with the chain.

What Durant didn't know was that he had been taken from the first group of Somalis who seized him. Yousef Dahir Mo'alim, the neighborhood militia leader who had spared him from the attacking crowd after it had overwhelmed and killed the others, had intended to carry Durant back to his village and turn him over to leaders of the Habr Gidr. As they'd left the crash site, however, they were stopped by a better-armed band of maverick mooryan, who had a technical with a big gun in back. This group considered the injured pilot not a war prisoner to be swapped for captured clan leaders, but a hostage. They knew somebody would pay money to get him back. Mo'alim's men were outnumbered and outgunned, so they'd reluctantly given Durant up. This was the way things were in Mogadishu. If Aidid wanted the pilot back, he would have to fight for him, or pay.

Durant's right leg ached where the femur was broken and he could feel the ooze of blood inside his pants where one end of the broken bone had pushed through his skin in the manhandling. It did not hurt that badly. He didn't know if that was good or bad. He was still alive, so the bone had not punctured an artery. His back was what really bothered him. He figured he'd crushed a vertebra in the crash.

He managed to work one hand free of the chain. He was sweating so his hand slid out easily when he relaxed it. It gave him his first sense of triumph. He had fought back in some small way. He could wipe the dirt from his nose and eyes and straighten his broken leg somewhat and get a little more comfortable. Then he wrapped his hand back into the chain so that he still appeared to be bound.