Horse Soldiers Read online

  In first class, where the hijackers had been sitting, one man lay slumped with his throat cut. Two flight attendants had been stabbed. They were still alive, one with an oxygen mask pressed to her face, the other with minor wounds.

  At 8:44 a.m., the plane dipped low over New York City.

  A flight attendant on board, Madeline “Amy” Sweeney, was talking on a cell phone to an air traffic controller when she looked out the window and said, “Something is wrong. We are in a rapid descent…. We are all over the place.” And then, before the line went dead: “We are flying low…. We are flying way too low!” A few seconds passed. “Oh my God, we are way too low!”

  At 8:46 a.m., American Flight 11, racing at the speed of nearly 500 miles per hour, rammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Ten thousand gallons of aviation fuel exploded, with the force of 7 million sticks of dynamite.

  Fourteen minutes later, on board United Flight 175, which was now under Marwan’s control, a young man named Peter Hanson was making a phone call to his father, Lee, back in Easton, Connecticut.

  “It’s getting bad, Dad,” he said. “A stewardess was stabbed. They seem to have knives and Mace. They said they have a bomb. It’s getting very bad on the plane. Passengers are throwing up and getting sick. The plane is making jerky movements. I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane. I think we are going down. I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace else and fly into a building. Don’t worry, Dad. If it happens, it’ll be very fast. My God, my God.”

  At 9:03 a.m., United Flight 175 hit the south tower.

  Thirty-four minutes later, American Flight 77 dove into the Pentagon.

  At 10:03 a.m., United Flight 93 exploded in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

  Cal Spencer had just gotten out of the Cumberland River and was pulling the Zodiacs onto the boat trailers when somebody in the truck said, “Jesus, can’t anybody turn up the heat?” Spencer shook off the morning’s cold, grumbled, reached over, and punched a few buttons on the dash. Then he wheeled the truck for home through the lush Tennessee countryside, the trees along the interstate painted with the first, faint brush of autumn.

  Spencer ticked off the day’s tasks: hurry back to the team room, finish up the avalanche of paperwork that always fell on your desk when you finished a training mission, get home, help Marcha make dinner, check in with Jake about his homework, go to bed. Get up. Repeat.

  Sandy-haired, wry, with the lanky build of a baseball player, Spencer was usually ready with a sly quip to liven up any dreary moment. But not this morning. The night had been miserable. He’d led eight Special Forces soldiers up the Cumberland River in the dark, using night vision goggles and a GPS. The work wasn’t hard—Spencer had done this kind of thing hundreds of times, and he was bored. They had delivered their “package,” a second Special Forces team traveling with them, to the predetermined infiltration point on the river, shut down the outboard motors, and waited.

  They didn’t have long. Seconds later, the large shadow of a Chinook helicopter appeared over the trees, floated downward, and hovered just feet above the water, a metal insect descended from the heavens, louder than hell, the twin rotors sending mountains of cold spray into the air. The helo was flown by the top-notch pilots of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR). SOAR’s guarantee was that they would arrive thirty seconds on either side of their scheduled time, no matter what, and they had kept their promise. Created in the wake of the 1980 rescue attempt of U.S. Embassy workers in Iran (the Army had determined that poor air support had caused the mission’s failure), the SOAR pilots lived a secretive existence flying exquisitely planned missions in the world’s hairiest places. They operated from a base situated behind acres of barbed wire in a remote corner of Fort Campbell, a twenty-minute drive down cracked, two-lane blacktop from Spencer’s own team room. Spencer never knew any of the pilots’ names and they didn’t know his. It was better that way: in case the real thing ever happened—if they ever went to war—nobody could compromise anyone’s identities. Spencer’s team completed the linkup and he and his men yanked the outboards to life and roared back upriver. Their job was over. Time to get back to the boat landing.

  And then they ran into fog. They had to stop the boats because some in the group were blindly bumping into the riverbank. Suddenly, a barge came steaming out of the dark—the big vessel was headed straight for them.

  They all sped for the riverbank, where—better safe than sorry—they tied up to some low-hanging tree branches and prepared to spend the night.

  Spencer hadn’t dressed for the cold weather. He sat in the bottom of the boat wrapped in a poncho, teeth chattering, trying to pretend the chill didn’t matter. Sergeant First Class Sam Diller found a bunch of life jackets and piled those on top of himself, eight in all, yet still he lay on the boat bottom shivering.

  When they pulled up at the boat ramp the next morning, Cal Spencer wanted nothing more than to be curled up at home, martini in hand, watching TV.

  He thought that maybe at age forty he was getting too old for this kind of work. As a chief warrant officer, Spencer was the senior man on the team. He was a father figure to the younger guys, and a brother to Diller and Master Sergeant Pat Essex, who had served with him in Desert Storm. Essex was thin, and stern, of good Minnesota stock (he had grown up in California), and wanted to spend his retirement years bird-watching. Sam Diller was from a holler in West Virginia that Cal thought probably didn’t even exist anymore. He was also, Cal thought, one of the smartest guys on the team.

  They were all good men, and someday, Spencer mused, they might just get a real mission. As he pondered all of this, news of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center broke over the truck’s radio.

  Marcha Spencer was still at home in bed at Fort Campbell when the phone rang. It was her best friend, Lisa, Diller’s wife.

  “Turn on the TV!” she said. Lisa sounded freaked out, and that wasn’t like her. She was one of the most poised people Marcha knew, tough as nails.

  Marcha flipped on the set and couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The first plane had hit the north tower and the building was in flames. Marcha stared at the screen, not comprehending the picture.

  “Those people,” she murmured. And then she thought: Cal. He’ll be leaving soon.

  “They’re going,” said Lisa, on the other end, reading her mind.

  The two women immediately tried to figure out where their husbands would be deployed. What country? Who had done this? Cal had a deployment scheduled in a few weeks to Jordan, a training mission with the Jordanian army. Marcha knew that’d be canceled now.

  As they were talking, the second plane hit.

  “Oh my God!” the two friends screamed at each other into the phone. “Oh my God!”

  Looking at the TV, Marcha said to her friend, “This one really scares me, Lisa. This one feels different.” Something, they knew, had just ended, and something had just begun.

  Hearing the news of the attacks, Spencer floored the big five-ton truck, double-timing it to Fort Campbell, headquarters of the U.S. Army’s Fifth Special Forces Group. The huge post consists of over 100,000 scrubby acres of buckled hills, scorched firing ranges, and humid tangles of kudzu, sixty-one miles northwest of Nashville. The third largest post in the United States, it actually sprawls between two states, the majority of it located in Tennessee, near Clarksville. Fort Campbell’s post office sits in Kentucky, outside the farming burg of Hopkinsville. The entire area is ringed and quilted by strip malls, franchise steakhouses, discount furniture stores, and cornfields. Spencer imagined Marcha at home watching the news on TV. He knew she was tough, but he didn’t know how she’d react to the terrible images.

  As he drove, he felt sick to his stomach, confused. He was pretty sure that as soon he got back to base, they’d begin packing to leave. Beyond that, everything was a question mark.

  The banter in the truck was nonstop.

  Can you believe this?
>
  Who the hell did this?

  We’re going to war, right?

  Spencer could only imagine what was going on in those planes. He’d been in firefights, he had seen people killed and torn up and blown away, but this was different. These were civilians.

  On September 11, 2001, Dean Nosorog had been a married man for exactly four days, a fact that continued to surprise him. He, Dean Nosorog, from a hardscrabble farm in Minnesota, married to the prettiest girl on the planet!

  At the moment the planes hit, he and Kelly were in Tahiti, asleep in their hotel room overlooking a black crescent of beach dotted by palm trees. They got up, had breakfast on their balcony, and decided to go mountain-biking. Dean, madly in love, felt a world away from his real life. The best part was that he had two weeks of this easeful living left. They walked out of the hotel hand-in-hand, oblivious to the first news reports of the attacks playing out on a TV in a corner of the lobby.

  As they pedaled up a mountain road, no one passing by would have guessed Dean was a secret soldier in a part of the Army most Americans knew little about, the U.S. Army Special Forces. Sunburned, freckled, with unruly red hair, dressed in cargo shorts and T-shirt, Dean resembled a young pharmaceutical salesman on holiday. He kicked off and sped the bike toward town, yelling to Kelly to catch up.

  At the bottom of the hill, they pulled into a tiny French pizzeria and ordered. An American woman quickly walked up out of breath and said, “Have you heard?” She was in tears.

  “A plane,” she blubbered. “A plane just ran into a building in New York.”

  Dean looked at Kelly, cocking an eyebrow. What?

  “And there was a second plane,” she went on. “A second plane hit another building.”

  Dean’s face dropped. “Hurry,” he told Kelly. The two of them raced back to the hotel.

  The lobby was now filled with Americans, all of them, it seemed, also on their honeymoon. Dean pushed up to the TV: everybody huddled close, in shock. Dean watched for several minutes and then he turned to Kelly.

  “I’ve got to make a phone call,” he said.

  He started back toward their room and along the way paused at the front desk, picking up a copy of the International Herald Tribune.

  The newspaper’s headline stopped him cold.

  Massoud was dead. The leader of the Afghan people in their fight against the Taliban. The great man had been at war for more than twenty years—the ultimate survivor. Now he was dead.

  Not Massoud. Assassinated: September 9, 2001. In Afghanistan. Dean felt that the timing could not be an accident.

  All week, the Lion had been close to dying—he just hadn’t known it.

  Handsome, graying at the temples, with a sharp smile and eyes like black enamel, the Lion had been restless. He had decided he would attack the Taliban that night, September 9. In the camp, men had been loading AK-47 magazines with ammo, sorting and counting RPGs, feeding their exhausted, shaggy horses, whose neighing and snorting caromed off rock walls scoured by cold mountain winds.

  Massoud had been fighting the Taliban for seven years and—he had to admit—they were about to win. He was boxed into a tiny slice of the Panjshir Valley, his boyhood home, a verdant swath of hills and violet escarpments, facing death. Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, with the help of foreign Arabs, were pummeling his resistance forces, their last obstacle to taking total control. Still, he vowed to press on. He would never give up the fight. He would bite and claw at the enemy. He would kill, wound, harass. Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshir, an ally of the United States and the CIA during the 1979–89 Soviet invasion of the country, was the last chance Afghan citizens had to defeat the Taliban.

  He had fought the Soviets for ten years, until they retreated in defeat. And then he had fought the men with whom he had fought the Soviets. Thousands and thousands had died on all sides, and Massoud, although revered, had plenty of skeletons in his own closet. Massoud had been at war for twenty-two years.

  In April 2001, Massoud had traveled to Strasbourg to ask for international assistance. There, he had said to the press, “If President Bush doesn’t help us, then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon—and it will be too late.” Massoud had been describing the Taliban and a man named Osama bin Laden, the billionaire son of a Saudi construction mogul. No one listened.

  That neglect had given bin Laden the summer to organize a secret plan to kill Massoud. The mastermind was a man named Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Al Qaeda commander. Bin Laden’s army, totaling some 3,000 trained soldiers, had merged with the Taliban, consisting of 15,000 farmers and butchers, teachers and lawyers. Together, they wanted to return the Middle East to the fourteenth century, into a golden age ruled by Islamic law. A big step toward that great step back would be the elimination of Ahmed Shah Massoud.

  In his hotel room, Dean dialed the Fifth Special Forces Group Headquarters at Fort Campbell. He got the answering machine of his battalion commander. Frantic, he left a message. “Sir,” he said, “I’m in Tahiti, I just saw what happened on TV.” He found himself talking way too fast. “I want to talk to you, I want to know what is going on. What do you need from me?”

  Dean glanced again at the newspaper in his hand. “I’m looking at the International Herald Tribune. The leader of the Northern Alliance was assassinated, according to this article, by bin Laden.”

  Dean knew bin Laden and he knew Massoud. The famous guerrilla had been the leader of something called the Northern Alliance, a shaky collection of three Afghan tribes who’d fought the Taliban. With Massoud dead, Dean knew that the Alliance would be in danger of falling apart. Massoud’s assassination and the attacks he’d seen on TV this morning must, Dean guessed, be a coordinated assault. He hung up, redialed, and started looking for flights to Fort Campbell.

  At his base camp in the Panjshir Valley, Massoud had been on the phone when the assassins arrived, two Arabs traveling on stolen Belgian passports, and posing as television journalists who had cajoled to meet with Massoud for several weeks.

  He welcomed the visitors and they seated themselves opposite him. Massoud requested tea for his guests. He had asked to see the list of interview questions while chatting with the cameraman as he set up his equipment. He told them they could begin the interview.

  The Arab aimed the eye of the lens at Massoud’s waist. He switched it on. Inexplicably, the camera flashed with blue fire, choking the room with smoke. The fire leaped straight at Massoud.

  As the smoke lifted, Massoud lay bleeding in the charred hulk of his chair, a hole blown through the chair’s back.

  The cameraman was dead, cut in half by the force of the bomb that had been strapped to the battery pack on his waist.

  Massoud had whispered to a bodyguard, “Pick me up.” Fingers on his right hand had been blown away; his face was a bloody mess. Someone quickly stuffed cotton into his eye sockets. He had been shot through the heart by shrapnel. There was no hope of saving him.

  His aides stashed him in a refrigerator at a Tajikistan morgue, and vowed to stay mum. They feared the resistance fighters would lose heart and run.

  Within a day of Massoud’s death, the hills around Konduz echoed with rumors of his passing, carried through canyon and river-wash by handheld Motorola radios. In a trench far north of the city, a young man from California had settled down in the beige, talcum earth and claimed it as Allah’s last battleground.

  Abdul Hamid knew the final battle was near. He had just marched north with 130 other fighters for 100 miles from the city of Konduz, stepping over rock and thorn in thin sandals, going without food or water, a bandolier of ammunition slung over his shoulder, two grenades stuffed in a bag at his waist, to reach this place of war, the desolate village of Chichkeh. With Massoud rumored dead, they would finish off what was left of the corrupt enemies of Islam.

  Abdul was a member of bin Laden’s crack unit called the 055 Brigade, part of the larger Al Qaeda army. He had met the great man a month earlier near Kandah
ar, the birthplace of the Taliban and their spiritual home of study—the word talib is Arabic for “student.” The training camp, Al Farooq, was frequented by Saudis, by Chechens and Pakistanis, the very best of the most serious martyrs drawn to the searing light of bin Laden’s message. Some of the camp followers had achieved martyrdom in the previous several years by bombing embassies in Nairobi and Saudi Arabia, even an American warship named the USS Cole in Yemen. These righteous attacks had killed many people, Americans among then.

  His comrades, Abdul knew, had died in order to drive the dirty infidel, the Jew, the Christian, the Buddhist, the atheist from the land of Muhammad, which was Saudi Arabia, the hard-rock cradle of Islam, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. After the bombing of the USS Cole, which killed seventeen sailors and injured thirty-nine more, Abdul had e-mailed his mother and father in California that the ship’s presence in the Yemenese harbor had been an “act of war.” Abdul’s father was deeply disappointed that his son felt this way. But he also knew that there was nothing he could do to change his mind. He felt that his son was long past the point of being influenced by a father’s opinions.

  Bin Laden had made it clear in his fatwas—his edicts—that it was an insult for the infidel to have based his soldiers in Muhammad’s land after the first Gulf War, what the Americans called Desert Storm. As a result, every American, bin Laden claimed, must be killed wherever he was found.

  Abdul Hamid knew that bin Laden dreamed of an ancient world of Islam coming back to life. Violent jihad would be his time machine. Abdul Hamid had come to Afghanistan eleven months earlier to help the Taliban in his fight.

  At Al Farooq, soldiers-in-training were taught to shoot a rifle, throw a grenade, use a compass, and poison water, food, and people. Abdul had heard bin Laden speak at the camp. One of the men at Al Farooq had approached Abdul and asked if he wanted to carry the struggle to Israel or the United States. It would be easier for him to serve as a “sleeper” agent in such places than it would a dark-skinned Saudi or Pakistani. Part of Abdul Hamid was still a boy from Marin County, a young man who had sold his CD collection of rap music to pay for his ticket to the land of jihad. Part of him still wanted to go home and see his father, a lawyer, who had named him after John Lennon, and his mother, who had home-schooled him and loved him when other kids made fun of him. What he heard today, though, troubled him. There had been an attack, a big one, in the United States. Martyrs had flown jet airplanes into some buildings. They had killed thousands and thousands of Americans. He had told the bearded man, No. His fight was here, in Afghanistan, with the Taliban. He did not want to kill Americans.