Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force

Now the green light above the doors blinked on. This was it. “Go!” Martin shouted. A split-second before stepping into space, Joe Blount promised himself he’d down a whole pie at Vinnie’s Pizzeria on his next visit to Bensonhurst, just a little reward for a mission well done. Best pizza in the universe there at Vinnie’s. Have them pile everything on it and stand out on the sidewalk with the box, eat it right on 86th Street under the el, where John Travolta had strutted through the opening credits in that old flick, Saturday Night Fever. Stand there and gobble slice after slice until melted mozzarella and sauce were dripping from his nose and ears. Vinnie’s in Bensonhurst, a whole goddamn pie, yessiree. He sprang up and out into the North African sky, followed at one-second intervals by the other exiting troopers.

Sergeant Vernon Martin went over last, counting by thousands, seeing the parachutes below mushroom open as the aircraft’s slipstream whipped him toward its tail fin and his silk threaded out behind him. One thousand. Assuming the proper body position on trained reflex, he snapped his feet and legs together, knees locked, toes pointing toward the ground. His head was lowered, his chin tucked against his chest, and he counted silently,

“… two thousand, three thousand…”

Martin sailed downward, the earth rushing up with eye-blurring speed. Then he felt a terrific, wrenching shock through his entire frame, and knew the static line had released the T-1 °C from his pack. The chute inflated overhead, quickly slowing his descent. He reached up and grabbed his shoulder risers as he floated down, looked and saw Blount descending to the right under his own open chute. The kid was in trouble. His shroud lines had gotten twisted and he was falling with his back to the wind, a bad way to land. For a tense moment it looked as if he’d forgotten his training, and was trying to untangle his suspension lines with his hands. But then he began pedaling his legs as if he were riding a bicycle, grasping his risers behind his neck and pulling outward on each pair until the lines untwisted, “slipping” to avoid a collision with another jumper. He came down to earth with a smooth, practiced roll.

Martin got ready for his own landing. He released the rucksack clipped to his waist, and it fell away from him at the end of the retainer line, hitting the ground an instant before he did and absorbing some of the jarring impact. Then, holding the control toggles close to his face, he turned into the wind and went into his PLF sequence, twisting and bending his body so the shock of landing was distributed between his calf, thigh, rump, and the side of his back. Barely pausing to catch his breath, Martin spilled the air from his canopy, hit his quick-release snaps to disengage the parachute from his harness, and got to his feet. An instant later he was sprinting toward the rallying point.

There was a mission to accomplish and no time to waste.

U.S. Embassy Compound, Khartoum, 0430 Hours, Sudan, February 18, 2007

Hoping he didn’t look as scared as he felt, Ambassador Neville Diamond let his eyes roam the gymnasium where five hundred human beings were packed together like cattle, their faces pale and sweaty in the abominably close quarters. Scant hours ago, Nathan Butto had slipped into the compound in the dead of night and met with Ed Sanderson, staying only long enough to deliver a brief but all-important communique he’d received from the American State Department: Cochise has left the village. It meant that the rescue team’s arrival was imminent. Sanderson had immediately rushed to Diamond’s quarters and told him to start rousing the occupants of the compound in preparation for the airlift. Within the hour, every last man, woman, and child had been hustled into the gym. A few of the children clutched dolls or favorite toys. Otherwise, they would leave with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Diamond’s gaze lingered on a pretty little blonde girl across the crowded room who was clutching her mommy with one hand and a stuffed panda bear with the other. She looked sleepy, confused, and terribly vulnerable. Feeling his stomach tighten, he tore his eyes from the child and shifted his attention back to Sanderson, who stood beside him talking to the commander of the embassy’s small Marine guard detachment. The CIA station chief’s voice was low and deliberate. Controlled as ever. Having already briefed the guard on the evacuation plan, he was now underscoring the need to maintain calm and order among the civilians as the compound was vacated. Diamond thought that sounded fine. You sure as hell didn’t want anybody to panic and yell, “Fire!” so to speak. But then his gaze briefly wandered toward the puffy-eyed face of the little blonde girl, the face of his daughter Alissa, still clinging to her mother and her panda for dear life, and the tightness in his belly became a painful cramp. How calm could they expect her to be if fighting broke out? he wondered.

How calm would anyone be?

Sharia Pasha al-Mek, One Block South of the U.S. Embassy, Khartoum, Sudan, 0500 Hours, February 18th, 2007

Minutes before the engagement began, Jamal Wahab was thinking about how much he hated Western foreigners, and Americans in particular. Hated their clothes, their language, their music, their food, hated everything about them. At twenty-four years old, he had never traveled outside the borders of his country, and rarely left the capital city, where he lived. He had been raised poor, the third eldest of seven children in a family where food had been scarce and material comfort was beyond even imagining. His father had eked out a meager living selling meat rolls on the street to Western oil company employees and their families. Those people had always had money enough to buy all the food they could eat, and all the comfort anyone could want. Those people had walked as if they owned the world, and Jamal Wahab had despised them for it. He was a simple man and knew little of politics. He had scarcely learned to read before his father died, and he’d left school to help support his younger brothers and sisters. As a teenager he’d joined the local militia and listened to his leaders call America the Great Satan and attribute their own nation’s problems to its decadent influence. And he had believed them. Jamal had, in short, needed someone to blame for circumstances he’d never understood.

Now, stealing toward the U.S. embassy in the predawn gloom, moving quickly with a squad of his brothers- in-arms, Jamal hefted his machine gun and wondered what it would feel like to kill an American. He had been told to fire only on the compound’s military guards and avoid harming civilians unless there was no other choice. But in his heart he knew that even if such an “unavoidable” situation didn’t arise during the takeover, he would make it come about. This morning he would kill an American. Perhaps one wearing the expensive clothes he’d always hated. Would such an act extinguish his burning rage or merely feed it? Only Allah knew. His nerves wound tight, Jamal hurried past the empty storefronts and no-name Eritrean restaurants lining the Sharia Pasha al-Mek, his close friend Ahmed racing along to his left, a big, rough-faced militiaman named Khalil to his right. All three men held their weapons at the ready.

They had come within a block of the embassy compound when Jamal saw the bulking HMMWV pulled against the curb near its side gate. Startled, he stopped running with a sharp intake of breath, grabbing hold of Ahmed’s shoulder. Though he did not specifically recognize it as such, there was a pintle-mounted Browning.50-caliber machine gun mounted on top of the Hummer’s roof. Its four-man crew wore black, gray, and white urban camouflage fatigues and carried M16A2 combat rifles, and their faces were smudged with black camouflage paint.

Jamal knew instantly these men weren’t embassy guards. Far from it. Somehow, the Americans had learned of the takeover and sent in forces to prevent it. “This area is off-limits,” one of the soldiers occupying the vehicle called out as he spotted the band of militiamen. The man standing in the gunner’s hatch swiveled the heavy machine gun in the group’s direction. “Halt and lay down your arms.”

Jamal looked at Ahmed, looked at Khalil, looked at his other comrades. “Show them how to die, brothers,” Khalil said in a harsh whisper. Jamal nodded, his heart pounding. Then, his hatred toward the Americans boiling up within him, he fingered the trigger of his gun and opened fire. Before he could hit anything, the Browning ratcheted out a short burst, the 50-caliber bullets cutting the front of his shirt to ragged shreds. He sagged to the ground in a shower of blood, his rifle turned uselessly skyward. Beside him, Khalil let out a whoop of suicidal defiance, reached into his pocket for a grenade, and was about to toss it at the Hummer when he too fell writhing in a hail of bullets. “Surrender your arms!” the American soldier warned the remaining attackers. Instead of obeying, they charged and were rapidly cut down. It was no contest.

Around the U.S. Embassy Compound, Khartoum, Sudan, 0800 Hours, February 18, 2007

The whole thing came down fast. The Sudanese militiamen knew nothing of tactics and had been relying largely on the element of surprise. Their plan, such as it was, had been to charge the compound at daylight and overwhelm a token contingent of Marine guards. Now they were running headlong into a battalion of crack American airborne troops armed with superior weapons and trained to conduct a tight, coordinated counterstrike. Despite their zeal and a considerable numerical advantage, they were over-matched and outfought with dispatch. Gunfire ripped through the awakening city for several hours after their attack commenced — occasionally punctuated by the