Goffena, circling overhead, had seen Shughart and Gordon lift Durant and then Cleveland and Field out of the fuselage. He knew they weren’t going to be able to carry them to where Jones’ Little Bird was waiting.
He got on the radio and explained to Jones and Maier that the boys had set up a perimeter around Durant’s Blackhawk. They had badly wounded crew members. They could not make it to the Little Bird. They were going to have to hang on until the ground force arrived.
After waiting on the ground about five minutes, Maier and Jones reluctantly asked for permission to leave and refuel. The Little Bird was running low, and they were vulnerable. They lifted off, leaving the Americans at crash site two to their fate.
DURANT’S BLACKHAWK had crashed in Wadigley, a crowded neighborhood just south of where Yousuf Dahir Mo’Alim lived on a street of rag huts and tin-roofed shanties. Mo’Alim was an armed bandit and gunman for hire, but on this day he had thrown his entire gang of 26 street fighters into the citywide effort to fight off the American invaders.
The instant Durant’s helicopter hit the ground, Mo’Alim saw everyone around him reverse direction. Moments before, the crowd on the streets and the fighters had been moving north, over to where the first helicopter had crashed. Now everyone was running south. Mo’Alim ran with them, a goateed veteran soldier waving his weapon and shouting.
“Turn back! Stop! There are still men inside who can shoot!”
Some listened to Mo’Alim, for he was known as a militia leader. Others ran on ahead. Ali Hussein, who managed a pharmacy near where the helicopter crashed, saw many of his neighbors grab guns and run toward the wreck. He caught hold of the arm of his friend Cawale, who owned the Black Sea restaurant. Cawale had a rifle. Hussein grabbed him by both shoulders.
“It’s dangerous. Don’t go!” he shouted at him. But there was the smell of blood and vengeance in the air. Cawale wrestled away from Hussein and joined the running crowd.
Minutes later, as Mo’Alim and his men reached the second crash site, they saw Cawale sprawled dead in the dirt, just four paces in front of the helicopter. The ground all around was littered with the bodies of Somalis. As Mo’Alim had expected, the Americans around the crashed helicopter were still very capable of fighting.
He tried to hold the crowd back, but they were angry and brazen. He wanted to find a way for his militiamen to get clear shots at the Americans, but it was difficult to approach the small clearing where the helicopter lay. The Americans had every approach covered with deadly automatic-weapons fire.
Mo’Alim waited for more of his men to catch up so that they could mount a coordinated attack.
DURANT STILL THOUGHT things were under control. His leg was broken but it didn’t hurt. He was on his back, propped against a supply kit next to a small tree, using his weapon to keep back the occasional Somali who poked his head into the clearing.
He could hear firing on the other side of the helicopter. He knew Ray Frank, his copilot, was hurt but alive. And somewhere were the two boys and his crew chief, Tommy Field. He wondered if Tommy was OK. He figured it was only a matter of time before the ground vehicles showed up to take them out.
Then he heard one of the guys—it was Gary Gordon—shout that he was hit. Just a quick shout of anger and pain. He didn’t hear the voice again.
The other guy, Randy Shughart, came back around to Durant’s side of the bird.
“Are there weapons on board?” he asked.
The crew chiefs carried M-16s. Durant told him where they were kept, and Shughart stepped into the craft, rummaged around and returned with both rifles. He handed Durant Gordon’s weapon, a CAR-15 automatic rifle loaded and ready to fire. He didn’t say what had happened to Gordon.
“What’s the support frequency on the survival radio?” Shughart asked.
It was then, for the first time, that it dawned on Durant that they were stranded. He felt a twist of alarm in his gut. If Shughart was asking how to set up communications, it meant he and Gordon had come in on their own. They were the entire rescue team. And Gordon had just been shot!
Durant explained standard procedure on the survival radio to Shughart. He said there was a channel Bravo, and he listened while Shughart called out. Shughart asked for immediate help, and was told that a reaction force was en route. Then Shughart took the weapons and moved back around to the other side of the helicopter.
Durant felt panic closing in now. He had to keep the Somalis away. He could hear them talking behind a wall, so he fired in that direction. It startled him because he had been firing single shots, but this new weapon was set on burst. The voices behind the wall stopped. Then two Somalis tried to climb over the nose end of the copter. He fired at them, and they jumped back. He didn’t know whether he had hit them.
A man tried to climb over the wall, and Durant shot him. Another came crawling from around the corner with a weapon, and Durant shot him, too.
Suddenly there was a mad fusillade on the other side of the helicopter that lasted for about two minutes. He heard Shughart shout in pain. The shooting stopped.
High overhead in the surveillance helicopters, worried commanders were watching on video screens.
“Do you have video over crash site number two?”
“Indigenous personnel moving around all over the crash site.”
“Indigenous?”
“That’s affirmative, over.”
The radio fell silent.
Terror washed over Durant like nothing he had ever felt. He could hear sounds of an angry mob. The crash had left the clearing littered with debris, and he heard a great shuffling sound as the Somalis pushed it away. There was no more shooting. The others must be dead. Durant knew what had happened to soldiers who had fallen into the hands of angry Somalis. They did gruesome, horrible things. The rumor around the hangar was that they’d played soccer with the heads of a couple of downed pilots earlier that summer. That was in store for him now. His second weapon was out of rounds. He still had a pistol strapped to his side, but he never even thought to reach for it.
It was over. He was done.
A Somali stepped around the nose of the helicopter. He seemed startled to find Durant lying there. The man shouted, and more Somalis came running. It was time to die. Durant placed the empty weapon across his chest, folded his hands over it, and turned his eyes to the sky.
CHAPTER 9
Alone, at the Mercy of an Angry Mob
ON THE CROWDED STREETS people surged with anger around Mike Durant’s crashed Blackhawk. They wanted to kill these Americans who had fallen from the sky and opened fire on their friends and neighbors. And despite furious gunfire from the soldiers around the downed helicopter, people continued to move in that direction.
In the months since the Rangers came, they had been swooping over the city at all hours of the night and day, blowing the tin roofs off houses and roping in to shoot and arrest Habr Gidr clan leaders. It was an insult to Somalia. On this day all the hatred had come to a boil, and many were already dead.
At the wreck site, Sgt. First Class Randy Shughart and Master Sgt. Gary Gordon were fending off the crowd, waiting for the promised rescue convoy of ground troops. Yousuf Dahir Mo’Alim, the neighborhood militia leader, had been trying to keep the angry crowd back. Now he didn’t have to work as hard. The Somalian bodies strewn around the clearing and the deadly accurate fire from the Americans did that.
Mo’Alim stayed back himself. There was time. The Americans were surrounded. He waited until about a dozen of his men joined him, and then they fanned out to find good positions for a coordinated assault.
On the side of the helicopter he could see, there were two soldiers and a pilot who were firing. Another
