Horse Soldiers Read online

  The fort was immense, a walled city divided equally into southern and northern courtyards. Inside was a gold-domed mosque, some horse stables, irrigation ditches encircling plots of corn and wheat, and shady groves of tall, fragrant pine trees whipping in the stiff winds. The thick walls held secret hallways and compartments, and led to numerous storage rooms for grain and other valuables. The Taliban had cached an enormous pile of weapons in the southern compound in a dozen mud-walled horse stables, each as big as a one-car garage and topped with a dome-shaped roof. The stables were crammed to the rafters with rockets, RPGs, machine guns, and mortars. But there were more weapons. Six metal Conex trailers, like the kind semitrucks haul down interstates in the United States, also sat nearby, stuffed with even more guns and explosives.

  The fortress had been built in 1889 by Afghans, taking some eighteen thousand workers twelve years to complete, during an era of British incursions. It was a place built to be easily defended, a place to weather a siege.

  At each of the corners rose a mud parapet, a towerlike structure, some 80 feet high and 150 feet across, and built strong enough to support the weight of 10-ton tanks, which could be driven onto the parapet up long, gradual mud ramps rising from the fortress floor. Along the parapet walls, rectangular gunports, about twelve inches tall, were cut into the three-foot-thick mud—large enough to accommodate the swing of a rifle barrel at any advancing hordes below.

  In all, the fort measured some 600 yards long—about one third of a mile—and 300 yards wide.

  At the north end, a red-carpeted balcony stretched high above the courtyard. Wide and sunlit, it resembled a promenade, overlooking a swift stream bordered by a black wrought-iron fence and rose gardens that had been destroyed by the Taliban. Behind the balcony, double doors opened onto long hallways, offices, and living quarters.

  At each end of the fort’s central wall, which divided the interior into the two large courtyards, sat two more tall parapets, equally fitted for observation and defense with firing ports. A narrow, packed foot trail, about three feet wide, ran around the entire rim along the protective, outer wall. In places, a thick mud wall, waist-high, partially shielded the walker from the interior of the courtyard, making it possible to move along the top of the wall and pop up and shoot either down into the fort, or up over the outer wall at attackers coming from the outside.

  In the middle of the southern courtyard, which was identical to the northern one (except for the balcony and offices overlooking it), sat the square-shaped Pink House. It was small, measuring about 75 feet on each side, too small a space for the six hundred prisoners who were ordered by Northern Alliance soldiers down the stairs and into its dark basement, where they were packed tight like matchsticks, one against another.

  There, down in a dank corner, on a dirt floor that smelled of worms and sweat, brooded a young American. His friends knew him by the name of Abdul Hamid. He had walked for several days to get to this moment of surrender, which he hoped would finally lead him home to California. He was tired, hungry, his chest pounding, skipping a beat, like a washing machine out of balance. He worried that he was going to have a heart attack, a scary thought at age twenty-one.

  Around him, he could hear men praying as they unfolded hidden weapons from the long, damp wings of their clothing.

  The following morning, November 25, two CIA paramilitary officers, Dave Olson and Mike Spann, kitted up at headquarters in Mazar and prepared to drive across town to the fort. Both men hoped to interrogate as many prisoners as possible.

  Mitchell was in the school cafeteria, drinking chai and eating nan, a delicious, chewy flat bread, when Spann and Olson walked up. Mitchell knew Olson the better of the two. Spann, a former Marine artillery officer, had joined the Agency three years earlier. He wore blue jeans and a black sweater, and was of medium height, with severe cheekbones and a crooked smile, his blond hair cut close. Olson was tall and burly, with a thin salt and pepper beard over an old case of acne. He spoke excellent Dari, the glottal, hissing language of the local Northern Alliance fighters, and he was dressed in a black, knee-length blouse, called a shalwar kameez, over beige pants.

  Mitchell noticed immediately that the two CIA guys weren’t carrying enough ammunition. For whatever reasons, they had about four ammo magazines between them. Mitchell preferred the standard operating procedure of bringing four magazines apiece on a mission. Olson and Spann carried folding-stock AK-47s slung over their shoulders and 9mm pistols strapped in holsters on their legs. Spann carried another pistol tucked at the small of his back in his pants’ waistband. Neither man had a radio, which Mitchell also thought was strange. But then again, these CIA guys had always brought their own party with them. He figured that whatever Olson and Spann were doing this morning, it was their own educated business.

  Olson announced, “We’re going out to Qala to talk to these guys, see what we can find out.”

  The previous night, there had been a brief gunfight outside the schoolhouse, and Mitchell, sensing that the situation in the city was increasingly tense, had asked Olson if he himself and a couple of his men could go and provide security while the two CIA officers conducted their interrogations at Qala. Mitchell knew that interrogating prisoners was officially the CIA’s job, but he was worried about his friends’ safety. No, said Olson, you guys need to stay away. To Mitchell’s thinking, he was a bit nonchalant about the whole thing.

  All three men knew that the prisoners included many hard cases: Chechnyans, Pakistanis, Saudis—the epicenter of Al Qaeda. The men who had surrendered were the heart of Osama bin Laden’s most skilled army. Maybe—just maybe—one of them knew where bin Laden was.

  Watch your back, thought Mitchell.

  Olson and Spann started out the lobby’s front door to a truck parked in the circular drive. Beyond the wall, the busy midmorning traffic buzzed by. The vehicle slipped into the stream of cars, trucks, and donkey carts, and was gone.

  Sergeant Betz walked up and stood beside Mitchell, watching them go. He said, “I don’t like the looks of that.”

  Mitchell asked him why.

  “I dunno,” said Betz. “I like a guy to carry a lot of ammo when he leaves.”

  About a half hour later, Olson and Spann entered Qala.

  At the fort, Abdul Hamid climbed the steps from the basement of the Pink House and blinked in the morning sun, his arms tied behind him with a turban. The stairway resembled a collapsed brick chimney as it emerged from the dark hole that reeked of piss and shit.

  Abdul was led past the Pink House, the walls of the fort soaring around him. About a hundred other prisoners had already been led into the courtyard, also trussed with their own clothing, arms behind their backs, sitting cross-legged on an apron of trampled weeds twisting up from hardpan mud.

  Mike Spann bent down and peered at Abdul.

  For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out where the kid was from or who he was. Arab? Pakistani? Canadian? He studied Abdul’s tattered British commando sweater, sensing that the prisoner—what was he, twenty, twenty-three?—could speak at least some passable English.

  “Where are you from?” Spann demanded. “You believe in what you’re doing here that much, you’re willing to be killed here?”

  No answer came.

  “What’s your name? Who brought you here to Afghanistan?”

  The kid on the carpet dropped his head, stared at the shalwar kameez bunched around his knees.

  “Put your head up!” Spann yelled.

  The young man’s face was sunburned, his eyes the color of cold tea.

  Spann let his gaze linger, and then raised a digital camera and framed a shot. The photo would be sent by encrypted satellite communications back to headquarters, where the image would be cross-referenced against a digital lineup of terrorists and known Al Qaeda soldiers.

  “Mike!”

  It was Olson, lumbering across the dusty courtyard. He’d spent the last five minutes talking with another group of prisoners. Olson towered ove
r the young man on the ground.

  “Yeah,” said Spann, “he won’t talk to me…I was explaining to the guy we just want to talk to him, find out what his story is.”

  “Well, he’s a Muslim, you know,” mused Olson. “The problem is, he’s got to decide if he wants to live or die…. We can only help theguys who want to talk to us.”

  It was Spann’s turn: “Do you know the people here you’re working with are terrorists, and killed other Muslims? There were several hundred Muslims killed in the bombing in New York City. Is that what the Koran teaches? Are you going to talk to us?”

  Then it was back to Olson: “That’s all right, man. Gotta give him a chance. He got his chance.”

  Olson scuffed the dirt with his boot; Spann, exasperated, hands on hips, looked at the prisoner.

  Finally, Spann said, “Did you get a chance to look at any of the passports?”

  “There’s a couple of Saudis, and I didn’t see the others.”

  They agreed that the young man wasn’t going to tell them anything, and the two CIA officers started walking away along a gravel path lined by pine trees toward the gate in the middle of a tall mud wall that divided the fort into its separate courtyards. They were headed to the former headquarters to regroup.

  At one point, Olson turned to see Spann stopped on the path, joking with a group of Northern Alliance soldiers. He turned back and kept walking.

  By the time Olson reached the middle gate he heard the explosion of a grenade, followed by a burst of gunfire. He turned.

  Spann was frantically attempting to fight off a gang of prisoners who were beating at him with their fists and screaming, Allah Akbar!—God is Great!

  Olson started running toward Spann, and as he did so, Spann emptied his pistol into the crowd, then reached behind to the other gun, hidden in his waistband. He fired and fell to the ground under the storm of flesh.

  Seeing that Spann was down and thinking he was already dead, Olson spun around to see a Taliban soldier running at him, firing from the hip with an AK-47.

  Olson could hear the snap of the rounds passing and was amazed he hadn’t been hit. The guy kept coming, and finally Olson, momentarily frozen on the spot, raised his pistol and shot him.

  The man skidded to a stop at Olson’s feet, so close Olson could almost touch him with his boot.

  He next turned and fired at the crowd of people beating on Spann. He was pretty sure he killed a few of them. He sensed he was being rushed again and spun to shoot another man running at him. By now, he was out of bullets.

  And so he ran. He ran down the path and into the northern courtyard, past the ruined rose garden fronting the grand balcony. He ran up the steps and into the inner courtyard, where he made a phone call, alerting Mitchell and Sonntag back at the schoolhouse.

  “I think Mike’s dead,” Olson said over the phone. “I think he’s dead! We are under attack. I repeat, I am receiving heavy fire!” RPGs were hitting the balcony wall, rocking the place.

  Back in the southern courtyard, Abdul Hamid had been shot in the leg and lay in the dirt. He tried crawling back to the basement steps, but it was too far. He wondered if he’d ever see his mother again, in California. He wondered who the strange men were who had been asking him questions. He wondered if they knew his real name: John Walker Lindh.

  Meanwhile, one of the prisoners walked up and fired twice, point-blank, at Mike Spann.

  By the hundreds, the Taliban prisoners jumped up from the ground where they’d been ordered to sit by Spann and Olson.

  They shook off the turbans binding their wrists and looked wildly around, not sure what to do next.

  Up on the fortress walls, a dozen or so Northern Alliance guards were pouring fire into the courtyard, raking the hard ground, raising divots of mud, mowing men down.

  Several minutes later, the prisoners found the weapons cache.

  They swung open the metal doors of the long Conex trailers and beheld hundreds of rifles, grenades, and mortars, spilled at their feet.

  They scooped up the weapons and scattered around the courtyard, crouching behind mud buildings, in bushes, inside storerooms built into the walls. They started returning fire. The air roared.

  Wounded horses soon littered the courtyard, twitching and braying in the dust, as the hot sun beat down.

  Mitchell arrived with a ground force half an hour after Olson’s call. He pulled up outside the fortress gate, got out of the truck, and gazed up at the walls. He couldn’t believe the intensity of the fight. Several hundred guns must’ve been firing at once. Mortars started arcing over the walls and exploding around his truck.

  He and his men ran to the base of the fort and started climbing.

  The wall pitched skyward at about a 45-degree angle. They scuttled up hand-over-hand. At the top, out of breath, Mitchell peered at the mayhem below.

  Dead men were scattered up in the grove of pine trees, blown there by grenade blasts. They hung from the tree limbs, heavy and still, like blackened ornaments.

  He saw prisoners running among the trees, turning to fire up at the walls. There were six hundred of them down there, Mitchell knew. And they wanted out.

  He again counted the number of his own force: fifteen men. Fifteen.

  Before leaving for Afghanistan, Mitchell had been asked by his commander, “How will you die?” It was a blunt way of asking how he planned to stay alive. Until now, he hadn’t given the answer much thought.

  Massive explosions punched the sky. He figured the prisoners had finally found the mortars. It was only a matter of time before they zeroed in on the guards on the walls.

  The gunfire was filled with pops, fizzles, and cracks, like the snapping of enormous bones. Mitchell worried that the fighters inside were breaking out. He expected them to pile over the top wall at any moment.

  In a matter of minutes, something had gone terribly wrong. We fought so hard. And we won. But now we’re losing so damn quickly…

  He thought of his wife, then his two daughters. He had been worried that they were growing up without him. And now he thought: They’ll never know me at all.

  Mitchell took out his pistol and prepared to be overrun.

  PART ONE

  GOING TO WAR

  Comfort Inn Airport Motel South Portland, Maine

  September 11, 2001

  Little Bird woke.

  Beside the motel bed was a small nightstand, a radio alarm clock, a Bible. Beyond that, beyond the dirty window, a parking lot filled with the cars of commuters, of people on vacation, heading to work, to their families, to the rest of their lives. It had been a peaceful night for Little Bird at the end of a long, restless year. This morning, he was going to heaven.

  There is no god but one God and Muhammad is his messenger.

  His real name was Mohammed Atta, the nickname given to him by his father, a stern and dour lawyer who saw Atta as soft and overly sensitive, as too frail, too lazy, too fretful. Hadn’t he even timed the young Atta’s three-minute walks home through the streets of Cairo, after school, finding fault if he were seconds late? Little Bird, you take too long! Why?

  Arrivals, departures. There is no god but one God and Muhammad is his messenger.…

  He rose.

  Wearing jeans and a blue polo shirt, the floral bedspread smooth and shiny beneath his delicate hands, he looked like another harried tourist eager to start his day. Overhead, jet airliners roared away, taking off.

  Ten minutes later Atta stood at the South Portland, Maine, airport, holding a ticket he had purchased on the Internet two weeks earlier in Las Vegas. He’d gone there for a final organizational meeting. Four days earlier, he’d celebrated his birthday in a place called Shuckum’s Oyster House, in Hollywood, Florida. Through the night, he played pinball and drank cranberry juice and watched his fellow assassin, Marwan al-Shehhi, drink liquor and look at the women and nod to the music. He hated their touch, women. Their smell. Their sex. He had five days to live. He was thirty-three years old and he’d just pl
anned the largest attack on American soil in world history. Still, everything bored him. Eating bored him. Sleeping. Breathing. The only thing worth living for was dying.

  As Atta walked through the metal detector at the Portland airport, he carried a four-page note in his pocket that read:

  “When you get on the aircraft…think of it [your mission] as a battle for the sake of God…. Do not forget…the true promise is near and the zero-hour had arrived. Always remember to pray if possible before reaching the target or say something like, There is no god but one God and Muhammad is his messenger.”

  By 5:45 a.m., he was through security, along with another assassin, Abdul Aziz al-Omari. Fifteen minutes later, Atta’s plane took off, and swung out over the Atlantic headed for Boston. There, Atta was to switch planes for a flight to Los Angeles on American Airlines Flight 11.

  At 6:52 a.m., inside Boston’s Logan International Airport, seven minutes after he landed, his cell phone rang. It was Marwan, also in the airport, calling from a nearby terminal. The two men must’ve spoken quickly—Is everything ready? Yes, brother, everything is ready. There is no god but one God and we are his messengers.

  And then they hung up.

  By 7:40 a.m., Atta and his team of four others were seated comfortably, the jet pushing back from the gate. Thirty-four minutes later, United Flight 175, with Marwan al-Shehhi and his four comrades on board, also took off from Logan Airport in Boston.

  At the same time—8:14 a.m.—Atta proceeded to take control of American Airlines Flight 11. He and his compatriots sprayed Mace and yelled they had a bomb on board in order to move the passengers to the rear of the plane. At 8:25, air traffic control in Boston heard a voice say: “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”