Allies: The Trial

Allies: The Trial is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental.

Smashwords Edition

Text, cover, maps Copyright © 2013 by Wolf Riedel – All rights reserved.

Cover photo Copyright © 2005 by, and used under licence from, the Commonwealth of Australia – All rights reserved

Excerpt from Allies: The Rivers Copyright © 2013 by Wolf Riedel – All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without permission of the copyright owner is illegal and punishable by law.

eBook Smashwords Edition ISBN 978-0-9880766-5-5

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this ebook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return this eBook to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

CONTENTS

Copyright

Map 1 - Redback BRAVO 1 at Kakaran

Map 2 - Perth Commonwealth Court Area

Glossary

Prologue

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Epilogue

Author’s Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Excerpt from Allies: The Rivers

Excerpt from Allies: The Bay

— § —

For Andrew and Karyn

Map 1 – Redback BRAVO 1 at Kakaran

Map 2 – Perth Commonwealth Court Area

GLOSSARY

2i/c – Second in command (AU, CA, UK, US)

ACM – anti-coalition militia e.g. Taliban (AF)

ANA – Afghan National Army

AO – Area of Operations (US, CA)

AQ – al-Qaeda – Islamist terrorist organization (International)

CG – Commanding General (US)

CJSOTF-A – Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force – Afghanistan (US)

CO – Commanding Officer (US, CA)

Delta – 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment – Delta (US)

DTI – Director Transnational Intelligence (CA)

G2 – intelligence cell or officer at brigade or division (US)

HLZ – Helicopter Landing Zone (US)

Intel –intelligence – aka int (NATO)

IntO – Intelligence Officer (UK, CA, AU, NZ)

ISAF – International Security Assistance Force (NATO)

JAG – Judge Advocate General (US, CA)

JTF 2 – Joint Task Force 2 (CA)

JSOC – Joint Special Operations Command (US)

Klick – one kilometer (US, CA)

NDHQ – National Defence Headquarters (CA)

ODA – Operational Detachment-Alpha (US)

ODB – Operational Detachment Bravo (US)

ODC – Operational Detachment Charlie (US)

PPCLI – Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry – aka Patricias (CA)

Ranger – U.S. Army 75th Ranger Regiment

SAS – Special Air Service (UK, NZ) Special Air Service Regiment – SASR (AU)

SF – Special Forces – members and elements belonging to a SFG(A) – not to be confused with the term SOF – special operations forces which refers to the wider community to which the SF belongs and which includes elements such as Delta, SEALs, JTF 2 etc.

SFG(A) – Special Forces Group (Airborne) – aka Green Berets (US)

SOJ2 – Special Operations Joint Staff - 2 (Intelligence) (US)

TAC – Tactical command post (US, CA)

TOC – Tactical operations center (US)

Taliban – armed Islamist militants (AF, PK)

TF – Task Force - a military element or unit specifically configured for a given task. Where Navy or Air Force units included it becomes a Joint TF or JTF (NATO)

TIC – troops in contact (US, CA, AU, NZ)

UAV – Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (US, CA)

USAIS – US Army Intelligence Support Activity – aka Gray Fox – elements deployed with Tier 1 SF units designated TF Orange – tasks include signals intercepts (US)

USASOC – US Army Special Operations Command

USSOCOM – US Special Operations Command (aka SOCOM)

VCDS – Vice Chief of Defence Staff (CA)

— § —

THE TRIAL

AN ALLIES NOVEL

— § —

PROLOGUE

— § —

Mehni Road, Herat Afghanistan

Sun 04 Sep 05 0103 hrs AFT

Emal did not have a gun.

He had always thought that it was amusing that in a country full of guns, he—the one who had provided so many of them—should be the one who would go on operations without one.

Emal Khan Noorzai was born a Pashtun in the city of Karachi in Pakistan. His family was of the Noorzai tribe; a part of the Duranni tribal confederation’s Panjpai sub-branch. The Duranni constitute a large portion of the population of Afghanistan, particularly in the South. Amongst the most literate and liberal of the Pashtuns, the Duranni have had a long history of leadership; their influence had spread throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan.

While his family had lived in Pakistan for centuries it was still firmly connected to the family's cultural homeland region of Kandahar. For Emal, the boundaries separating Afghanistan and Pakistan were purely an anachronistic remnant of the colonial games played by the British and the Russian empires as they sought to limit each other's expansion. The Durand Line, agreed to between Afghanistan and Britain in 1893 coming more than a decade after the Second Anglo-Afghan War, put large areas of Afghanistan, primarily Pashtun lands, under the control of British India; a colonial power encompassing modern day Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Burma. For Afghans, even after a Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919, the line was seen merely as a limit on control and not one of sovereignty ceded.

In 1947, however, when Pakistan was partitioned from British India, it claimed the lands to its side of the line as sovereign territory.

Sovereignty was an issue for Afghanistan’s central government but never for Emal. Being a Pashtun did not make him an Afghan. Growing up as a youth in Karachi, he had always identified with the Pashtun as his people and Pakistan as his country. While Pakistan and Afghanistan were both Muslim countries, their relationships were often at odds; nowhere more so than the Durand line issue. As a Pakistani, Emal’s traditional enemy was first and foremost India.

India had helped East Pakistan—now Bangladesh—separate in 1971 and had been making friendship overtures to Afghanistan for decades in an effort to rein in Pakistan by destabilizing its western frontier territories. When the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan launched a coup and created a communist style Democratic Republic, India was the only South-Asian country to recognize it. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to prop up its communist regime, India supported them. India also supported the Afghan coalition government that followed the Soviet's withdrawal.

The arrival of the Taliban changed things; not only was India's influence in Afghanistan cut, but Afghan fighters took on an active insurgent role in that part of the Kashmir region which was under Indian control. With the American coalition’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Indian involvement and influence was once again on the rise there. That could not be tolerated.

Emal gripped the decrepit looking 89 Corolla's steering wheel and squinted down the road to where he thought he could see a van pass under the dim streetlight in front of the target compound. A closer look made it clear it was not one of the vans belonging to Norowz’s team. He'd been waiting patiently for over a half hour now; smoking one cigarette after the other. At this time of night the street was almost deserted but for the hundreds of old empty cars parked haphazardly with their bumpers against the curb. Even so, he was getting concerned about being discovered sitting in his car for such a long time.

He had dressed to blend in. His immaculately tailored army uniform was left back in Quetta and instead his lean body was garbed in a traditional dark-grey shalwar kameez topped by a dark grey turban. His reddish-brown beard and mustache was kept short and neatly trimmed; shorter and neater than the Taliban he worked with.

A brief flicker of light illuminated the inside of the car yet again as he lit up another cigarette. He knew his risk of being seen would be greatly reduced if he didn't smoke at all, but for him, not smoking was not an option. His whole life he had been a chain smoker and at times of stress the cigarettes followed one after the other without interval.

— § —

As a youth he had never smoked at all. His father hadn't and had forbidden it in the house. All through his early years, even when he took his secondary and intermediate education at the Hasan Abdal Cadet College, he refrained from smoking. It was only after that, when he was enrolled as a Gentleman Cadet in the Ghaznavi Company of the 1st Pakistan Battalion of the Pakistan Military Academy at Abbattobad that he took up the habit. A habit which took full flight when, as a second lieutenant, he joined his first active service unit. The 9th Battalion (Wilde's) of the Frontier Force Regiment, coincidentally also stationed at Abbattobad, had a long history of service on the frontier.

As a young subaltern, Emal was responsible for the functioning of a rifle platoon of thirty-four men including four havildars. Within the year, he had been recognized for his exceptional intelligence, his ability to speak Pashto, Urdu and English fluently and his ability to train and lead his platoon to a superior standard. Even in those early days, his brooding brown eyes spoke of a hard and uncompromising attitude to duty. Within the next year, and now a lieutenant, his abilities brought him to the attention of the Special Services Group. At that time, the SSG, together with the American CIA and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, was supporting the mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Their operational needs and his skills caused them to waive the three years' prior service requirement for enrollment with the special forces.

Following his SSG training at Cherat, Emal joined the 1st Commando Yildiram Battalion in time to counter the Soviets’ Operation MAGISTRAL. The campaign by the Soviets’ 40th Army had the objective to reopen the roads from Kabul to Khost which had previously been cut off by Jalaluddin Haqqani's mujahideen forces. On January 7th and 8th, 1988, in some eighteen hours of fighting Emal’s hundred-man commando company was virtually destroyed for some meaningless mountain crag whose only importance was that it had held a company of Soviet paratroopers. He had returned from Afghanistan with a shattered shoulder and the Hilal-i-Jur'at, an award given only to officers for valor or courage on operations.

The withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan the following year did not curtail Pakistan's involvement in their support for the mujahideen. They continued to oppose Najibullah's Soviet supported regime until the Soviets’ own collapse in 1991. Their opposition continued even after Najibullah’s replacement in 1992 when the Peshawar Accord created a weak power-sharing Afghan government. The weaker the government in Afghanistan, the better for Pakistan.

Emal, by then a captain, had been accepted into the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence. As a junior officer, he served as part of a group providing military assistance to one of the Afghan government’s opponents; Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami faction. Here Emal learned the ropes for training, arming and supporting insurgents. Their aim to keep Afghanistan destabilized was wildly successful. Violence unleashed by the ISI's proxies, as well as others supported by the Iranians and the Saudis, not to mention Afghanistan’s own warlords, soon resulted in tens of thousands of Afghan deaths, a half million refugees, and general lawlessness throughout the country.

When, in early 1994, a thirty-five year-old mullah, leading a rag-tag handful of armed students from a madrasah, started making a name near to and in Kandahar, the ISI and Emal took notice. Thousands of young students from Pakistani madrasahs were recruited, armed and trained and sent off to join Mohammed Omar's Taliban; a word which simply meant the students. By year's end Kandahar had fallen; in September 1995 Herat fell; and one year later Kabul itself went down. The fall of Kabul did not end the war for Emal. As the ISI became disillusioned with Hekmatyar, it shifted the bulk of its support to the Taliban. Emal was reassigned to the Taliban, notwithstanding that the Taliban leadership came primarily from the Ghilzai tribal group which was a rival of the Duranni, and further notwithstanding that Emal considered the Taliban's Deobandi fundamentalism entirely too extreme for his taste. Orders were orders.

The next five years saw the Taliban forces continue their fight against heavy resistance in Northern Afghanistan. Tribal differences mattered in Afghanistan and the northern forces, dominated by Tajiks and Uzbeks, were having no part of the southern fundamentalist Pashtuns. Emal helped build the Taliban army to a force that consisted of some twenty thousand soldiers from the Pakistani army, another eight thousand Pakistani militants, three thousand foreign fighters under al-Qaeda and some fourteen thousand who were actually Afghans.

By September 2001, Emal, now a major and married with a wife and child living in Quetta, was spending half of each year on operations in Afghanistan and the other half back in Pakistan. He was convinced that Pakistan's security was enhanced by the weakened state of Afghanistan and the Taliban government’s pro-Pakistan, anti-India stance.

And then al-Qaeda changed all that with its attack on New York. Within months the Taliban and their allies were on the run and taking sanctuary in Pakistan. A last stand fight by the remnants of al-Qaeda and local Taliban militias in the lower Shah-i-Kot valley in Paktia province lost them not only some of their most seasoned fighters and their best training base but also their only remaining major supply center within the country. In many places much of the massive amount of Soviet-era arms fell into the hands of anti-Taliban militias.

The Taliban’s control of Afghanistan was gone, replaced by a coalition of new alliances and thousands of American and NATO forces. Worst of all, India had supported the coalition invasion and had moved quickly to establish relations with the post-Taliban regime. Its agencies were assisting in rebuilding Afghanistan's infrastructure. While outwardly it appeared that Pakistan was supporting the coalition forces with bases and transit for supplies, for Emal's unit, it was business as usual as it worked tirelessly to recruit, rebuild and refit the Taliban using both Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns.

The Taliban leadership, which considered themselves a government in exile, continued under the name of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Their leadership had taken refuge in Pakistan eventually settling in Quetta where it now styled itself as the Quetta Shura Taliban. Many of its members, however, remained in Afghanistan where they had, as citizen’s militia are wont to do, hid in small groups amongst the general population. Throughout 2002 small QST camps sprang up within Pakistan along the mostly unguarded mountainous border. Since Afghanistan refused to acknowledge the Durand line, it eschewed guarding it.

It was the American coalition forces that set the conditions for a comeback. The initial invasion had primarily consisted of small groups of special operations forces which directed air support and coordination to the bulk of the fighters who were Afghan anti-Taliban militias. As things stabilized, however, the special operators were reduced and overshadowed by conventional forces aimed at providing regional security and reconstruction efforts.

At its core, the new Afghan government was fragile. Its reliance on foreigners for security undermined its legitimacy in the eyes of many in the country. Further, the government and the foreigners had to rely on many regional governors who, in many cases, were a continuation of the corrupt warlords which the Taliban had first set out eliminate.

The Taliban had time on their side. They did not have to show the people that they would or even could succeed; they merely had to show that they were not gone and that the new government was failing.

While the number of coalition forces in Afghanistan did not drop after Operation ANACONDA in the Shah-i-Kot Valley and in fact nearly doubled, they were spread thinly around the country. To make matters even better for the Taliban, America’s focus inexplicably came off Afghanistan and onto Iraq and its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. As a result a new International Security Assistance Force, cobbled together from a polyglot of nations from under the NATO banner, started to take the American’s place. ISI quickly determined that the varying nations’ individual rules of engagements and caveats limited the new forces’ ability to conduct coordinated joint operations as a cohesive whole. It was a developing situation of ever expanding opportunity.

At first, operations were few and far between. Training of new Taliban cadres continued through 2002 and into 2003. By mid 2003 Mullah Omar was preemptively announcing We have the American forces and the puppet regime of Karzai on the run. They will collapse soon. Experience gained by early successes in Iraq had taught of the vulnerability of coalition forces to RPG ambushes and improvised explosive devices. In consequence, training courses now included a much greater emphasis on IED manufacture and usage. Suicide bombing techniques were also being taught albeit at camps separate from the main Afghan Taliban camps as the QST generally eschewed that tactic. Most trainees for martyrdom operations were foreigners and not Pashtuns. Emal's routine now included training a force of Taliban in Pakistan in the winter and mentoring their activities in Afghanistan during the summer fighting season.

Mentoring did not mean command by any stretch of the imagination. The Taliban were fiercely independent. They had their own leadership structure. But that leadership had been dependent upon foreign assistance since their inception. Arms—other than captured Soviet stockpiles—and funding had all come from outside Afghanistan; most of their manpower as well since most, but not all, Afghans had gotten quite tired of the Taliban’s draconian fundamentalist views. Almost everything the QST received came through the ISI. Their only sanctuaries were in Pakistan and these were allowed to operate solely at the ISI's sufferance. Being present in Pakistan made the leadership particularly vulnerable. The moment a Taliban leader showed any signs of wavering, such as wanting to start peace overtures with the Karzai government, they were arrested. This was a win-win situation for Pakistan. Not only did they remove an unreliable leader from the organization but they could also claim success with the coalition forces in showing their determination to stamp out the Taliban. Effectively, if a Taliban leader wished to stay in control of his faction, he quickly learned to play ball with the ISI. In the process the ISI had become hated by the Taliban leadership almost as much as the Americans were—but what could they do?

— § —

It was here, today, that a year of Emal's efforts would be put to the test.

Some ISI officers shadowed members of the various Taliban command shuras and as such influenced their operations and plans. At the tactical level, mid-level officers like Emal, provided logistics including salaries for the Taliban leaders and fighters, and monitored their operations to ensure they were getting their money's worth. By now, most low-level Taliban were more interested in the salary they received than in spreading fundamentalist ideology. Emal’s role was to monitor and control a nascent group of Taliban fighters located at the Panjwaii district approximately 30 kilometers west of Kandahar.

Kandahar had few government troops. Most of the American forces in the province had been focusing north of the city where the Taliban had been applying pressure. The city itself and much of the south was only weakly patrolled, if at all. Last year and this year, the QST had been in the process of quietly increasing its strength and building its lines of communication from Pakistan into the fertile river valleys of Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

The group now averaged around three hundred fighters made up of two core cells of approximately thirty full-time fighters each and nine village cells made up of between ten and fifty part-time fighters each. The group reported to the regional Taliban commander for the three provinces of Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan.

The Panjwaii district of Kandahar province did not have a large population, somewhat fewer than eighty thousand, but they farmed lush fields irrigated by the Arghandab River and straddling the Herat-Kandahar Highway. While the area could sustain any crops, the chief cash crop had quickly gone back to opium poppies and marijuana once the Taliban's temporary restrictive anti-drug policies of 2000 went unenforced. While producing nowhere near the volume as nearby Helmand province, the Panjwaii's farmers and, therefore, the Taliban's shadow government, reaped an enormous profit from the operations.

Norowz Mohamand was the group's leader. He had named the group simply Lashkar-e-Shaheen—Army of the Peregrine Falcon. Norowz was short in stature and stout, but all muscle. Born in Panjwaii, near Kandahar some forty-five years ago, and a veteran of the war against the Soviets and against the Americans at the Shah-i-Kot, he had come early to the Taliban movement joining in 1994 when there were less than fifty members. Wherever the fighting was thickest, there he would be in his calf length, rusty-red shalwar kameez with a Soviet army combat jacket and ammunition chest pouches. A loosely wrapped black turban sat over a wrinkled face bearing the proscribed fist size beard on his chin and eyes that seemed to have a perpetual glimmer of humor to them. He was rarely seen with a rifle in his hand. A commander can't think or give orders if he is busy shooting, he had said. Instead he scrambled amongst the rocks with a walkie-talkie, his rifle slung over his shoulder, calling each fighter by his name and directing the fight as it happened. While Norowz consulted often with Emal on tactics and strategy while planning Lashkar-e-Shaheen's missions, he never once asked for advice once the operation was underway. Then the fight was solely his.

While tonight was Norowz's fight, he wasn't actually here to conduct it. Since the operation only required some thirty men, one of his full-time, platoon-sized cells was tasked to execute it. Norowz, Emal and Tofan, Norowz’s deputy, had, however, planned every detail of the mission which was taking place well outside their usual area of operations in Herat.

Herat, a major center of almost four hundred thousand people, lay nestled in the middle of a fertile valley in the northwest. It had few Pashtuns; its population being primarily Persian-speaking Tajiks. Tajiks have much more in common with the nearby Iranians who have contributed largely to helping the recovery of the city's infrastructure. Here the Italians provided the bulk of the ISAF forces in the area. The Taliban had only a limited regional command structure here.

Taliban strategy for this year had turned sharply to undermining the official national and local governments and to drive a wedge between the people and their government and coalition forces.

This was usually achieved by creating a local-level tier of part-time fighters, young unemployed men, paid to take part in attacking coalition troops, attacking and destroying local infrastructure, and intimidating local leaders in order to bolster the Taliban's shadow government as the de facto local leaders.

Local villagers, who harbored these young men who made use of the Pashtunwali code of Melmastia—hospitality and protection to strangers—were seen by the coalition as siding with the Taliban. This resulted in arrests of locals and casualties amongst civilians in the ensuing firefights. So far the Taliban’s tactics had achieved only very limited success in this northern region.

Tonight's operation fell under another tactic; the destruction of government and coalition projects that were rebuilding the local infrastructure. It was to be accomplished by the kidnapping of several foreign non-governmental organization workers who were helping to rebuild some of Herat's historic infrastructure. The kidnapping aimed to raise funds by ransoming the NGO workers as well as coercing the workers' foreign governments to get their people out of Afghanistan.

Emal stubbed out his latest cigarette and looked up as he heard several vehicles coming up the A1 toward his position at Jihad Circle. There were five vans and two pickup trucks moving in a small convoy, which turned north right in front of him to go up Mehni Road. He continued to watch them as they stopped in front of the target house and quickly discharged three sections of fighters. One section took up protective positions around the vehicles and the front entrance, while the other two sections smashed their way into the building.

The low-pitched drawn out cracks of AK-47s broke the silence of the night.

— § —

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan

Sunday 04 Sep 05 0432 hrs AFT

All his life Colonel Phil Sambrook had the advantage of being able to fall into a deep sleep at the drop of a hat. The advantages for a soldier were obvious; one could get a maximum of rest in a short time in the most unusual and adverse circumstances. For Phil the disadvantage was that his sleep was usually so deep that when it was interrupted he would wake up groggy and disoriented for a minute or two; for a soldier not such a good thing.

That's how it was this morning. Phil had not expected to have his sleep interrupted before 0700 hrs, by which time he would in all probability have awakened anyway. Phil was a morning person and was usually up by 0630 and getting ready for his day. For today he had planned a slow day as his interviews, meetings, and general evidence gathering had been completed. He had only expected to meet with Chief Warrant Officer 3 O'Donnell for breakfast at 0800 hrs to go over how they would organize their report.

Sir! Colonel Sambrook, Sir! another series of loud knocks on his door.

Yeah! I'm up. What do you want? he replied.

Sir. the voice on the other side of the door said. "The JOC duty officer sent me over. He received a phone call for you from the CG of USSOCOM. The general wants you to call him back ASAP.

Phil stretched and rubbed his neck. The thin pillow that came with the bunk he was assigned had left it stiff and sore.

All right. I'm up thanks. Tell him I'll be there shortly.

Phil snapped on the light and looked around the roughly two meter square plywood B-Hut room that made up his sleeping space. Times were good and there were sufficient vacancies to provide a second adjacent room as his office space. A good thing too, as there was barely room to change his mind in the bedroom. Still it was a far step up from the tents they had occupied during his first stay at Bagram in 2002. Much of the camp, even now, was still under canvas.

Three years on and the events of Operation ANACONDA were still fresh in his mind.

He reached over to the bedside table and picked up the liter water bottle he had left there last night and gave his mouth several rinse and swallows. Bagram was at an elevation of fifteen hundred meters and the altitude combined with the late summer heat of forty plus degree Celsius—one hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit—made frequent hydrating a necessity. Luckily the nighttime temperatures had been a much more comfortable twenty degrees and in a pinch he could always use the air conditioning.

He reached under his bunk and pulled out his boots. He turned the boots upside down and gave them several quick raps to shake out whatever may have tried to make a home there for the night. Similarly he shook out his ACU trousers and a pair of fresh socks before slipping them and the boots on and stepping out to the latrines next to the B-Hut with his Dopp kit. A look in the mirror revealed his green eyes looking brighter than he thought they ought to and confirmed that yesterday's shave on his chiseled face just wouldn't cut it. A quick shave and a brush of water through his brown, crew-cut hair, made him more ready to face the morning.

Returning to his room, he slipped on an ACU jacket and his M9 pistol in its shoulder-slung CQC retention holster. An M4 carbine, desert sand and black patterned shemagh and an ACU patrol cap completed the outfit. He'd never been fond of the beret. It provided protection for neither the eyes nor the neck and merely sat on your head keeping your hair warm. Something invented by a Frenchman as a fashion statement had no place in his uniform inventory. The shemagh was probably frowned on by the REMFs at Bagram but the large cotton scarf was ideal in protecting the face or head in general from blowing sand or biting insects.

Phil's quarters were not far from the CJSOTF-A's Joint Operations Center. He quickly made his way along the dusty streets and through the JOC's security to the duty officer's work station where he took the message slip and sought direction to a private office where he could make a secure call. Along the way he stopped off at a small kitchenette and picked up a cup of rather thick and rancid coffee.

Colonel Phil Sambrook’s duty station was with SOJ2—Intelligence—at US Special Operations Command, at MacDill AFB in Tampa Florida. The thirty-eight year old Minnesotan West Pointer had had an extensive career serving with the 10th Mountain Division in New York, both the 101st Airborne Division and 1st Special Forces Detachment–Delta at Fort Bragg and the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Campbell Kentucky. He had been on operations in Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan and on temporary duty just about everywhere else. Tall and muscular, he remained physically and mentally fit despite having filled a desk job at USSOCOM since being assigned there three years ago; around the same time that his wife, Diana had been killed by a drunk driver in a motor vehicle accident in Tampa.

0450 hrs, he thought. That would make it 2110 hrs back at MacDill. Not really the time for a routine call so there must be something keeping the CG late at the office. While Sambrook was in Afghanistan with Chief Warrant Officer 3 O'Donnell, conducting some inquiries for General Clint Peters, USSOCOM’s Commanding General, the matter was not one of such urgency that it couldn’t easily await his return with a full report. This has to be something new.

Last spring, he and O'Donnell had been tasked to do an Officer's Board investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of a soldier from 10th Special Forces Group on an exercise in Canada. The investigation had teamed them up with Colonel Kurt Richter and several other members of the Canadian Forces. Their inquiries had led them from a fledgling homegrown terrorist cell in Toronto to connections in London, England and Berlin, Germany before finally leading to a major terrorist plot in Dearborn, Michigan.

As a result of their success, the CG had given Phil secondary duties as his roving troubleshooter. O'Donnell had been reassigned from his billet at the Special Warfare Center and School at Bragg to work with Phil in Tampa. O'Donnell had voiced his displeasure about that but Phil believed that deep down O'Donnell secretly considered it not such a bad deal after all. He and his young, second wife Tracy-Ann were renting a condo on Madeira Beach, a few miles down the road from Phil. This was something new for them as they had spent almost all their married life in on-post family housing. They were planning to buy but wanted to give it a shot for a while first to see if a condo was the way to go.

Phil dialed the CG's number and got his aide on the second ring. Office of the Commanding General USSOCOM, Major Allen speaking, Sir.

Bob. It's Colonel Sambrook. Is the General available?

Yes Sir. He's just finishing off some paper work. I'll tell him you're calling.

Phil had to wait no more than a few minutes before the general came on the line.

Did we get you out of bed, Phil? How's the investigation going?

Good Sir. Mister O'Donnell and I have wrapped up interviewing the witnesses here and we should be on our way back within a few days. Mister O'Donnell will be looking at flight availability later today. As we see it, there's nothing that credibly contradicts the after action reports.

Phil had been sent to Bagram to look into questions arising out of major loses to special operations forces on Operation RED WINGS.

The 2ndBattalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment, operating in Regional Command-East, had planned an operation to take place on the slopes of a mountain called Sawtalo Sar, in Kunar Province some thirty kilometers from the border with Pakistan. The objective of the operation was to disrupt anti-coalition militia operating in the area led by one Ahmed Shaw.

On June 27th, four SEALs from SEAL Delivery Vehicle Teams 1 and 2 were inserted by helicopter in advance of the operation to provide reconnaissance and surveillance of the target area. Within a few hours the team was discovered and attacked and eventually three of the four were killed. A call for help resulted in a heliborne quick reaction force being dispatched. During an attempt to insert of the QRF, one of the MH47D Chinooks, call-sign TURBINE 33, from 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment was struck by a rocket propelled grenade in the area of the rear rotor assembly and crashed killing the eight man crew as well as eight SEALs from SEAL Team 10. The rescue force's air and ground commander were both lost in the crash. Eventually all the casualties were recovered and the missing SDVT-1 member, who had been aided by a local villager, rescued.

The various American task forces in Afghanistan, including special operations ones, were under the overall command or control of Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan—CFC-A—a three-star general’s command. It reported to U.S. Central Command at MacDill, in Tampa.

To direct operations in the field CFC-A had a subordinate headquarters, Combined Joint Task Force-76, commanded by a two-star general, which commanded all conventional forces in Afghanistan. CJTF-76 was currently staffed primarily from the South European Task Force—an American formation that had been operating out of Italy since 1955.

Almost all American special operations forces deployed to Afghanistan ultimately came under the command of CENTCOM's subordinate headquarters U.S. Special Operations Command Central—SOCCENT—also located at MacDill. SOCCENT controlled those troops through its subordinate headquarters there, Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan.

In order to ensure that there was coordination between operations by conventional forces and special forces, CJTF-76 and CJSOTF-A were co-located at Bagram, and CJTF-76 had been granted OPCON—operational control—over CJSOTF-A.

Ultimately CJSOTF-A and SOCCENT had managed all the after action issues relating to the Op RED WINGS incident.

Why then was Phil here? Simply put, Phil, as General Peters' roving troubleshooter; was the go-to guy when the general needed quick and unfiltered answers. This is why Phil had gone to Canada this spring and why he had made a further fact finding trip to London in the wake of the two bombing incidents there last July. In the present case, the deceased commander of the four-man team was being looked at for a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor and some out-of-channel information had raised some questions as to what happened when the team was discovered by the shepherds and as to how many enemy combatants were involved. Rather than re-engaging the operational chain of command, Phil had been sent on a brief fact finding mission concurrent with what had quickly been called a routine staff visit to CJSOTF-A.

That's good to hear Phil, said the general. What I'm calling about is a new matter that might keep you there a day or two longer. Have you heard anything about an incident in Herat this morning?

No Sir. I called you as soon as I got to the JOC. On the other hand the duty officer didn't mention anything out of the ordinary to me and it didn't look like there was anything other than the usual nighttime staff at work.

Betty and Sean came to us an hour ago with some chatter that they had picked up from ISAF. It indicated that there has been a kidnapping of a number of international NGO members in Herat. By the sound of it, they've got a major problem up there.

Betty and Sean were Betty Taylor and Sean Fenton, USSOCOM's liaisons from the National Security Agency and CIA respectively. ISAF was the International Security Assistance Force, an international military force created in the wake of 9/11 by the United Nations, currently led by Britain and headquartered in Kabul. Until 2003 ISAF's mission was solely to provide security for the fledgling Karzai government in Kabul. Two years ago the UN's mandate was changed to expand ISAF, put it under NATO command and move it into the rest of the country easing the load on American troops deployed there. If it worked, it would allow the US to put the emphasis on the festering issues in Iraq.

In 2003, as NATO had taken the lead, ISAF expanded and by 2004 had moved a force, mostly Germans, to take over Regional Command-North. Just recently ISAF had completed having Italy take over Regional Command-West. The American headquarters, CTC-A currently retained Regional Commands-East and South but it was contemplated that ISAF would take them on eventually. First would be RC-S. Kurt Richter was currently in Afghanistan helping Canada wind down its operations with ISAF in Kabul and ramping up to work with the Americans in Kandahar in RC-S. In addition many countries were pouring funds and resources into Afghanistan, both through NATO and American Provincial Reconstruction Teams. The PRTs, working through NGOs and governmental agencies, were assigned the task to rebuild the infrastructure destroyed in the last twenty years. Herat was firmly within the Italian's RC-W.

One frequently ignored issue was that CTC-A and ISAF were two separate military commands; one reporting to an American headquarters, CENTCOM, the other to a NATO one, Joint Forces Command (JFC) in the Netherlands. Neither one was subordinate to the other resulting in a breach of a cardinal principal of war; unity of command. Each organization, at both the national and local level, had liaisons with the other but all too often there were gaps in reporting and coordination. So far the issues had been minor since neither the north nor the west was considered the hot spot that either the south or the volatile east was. 2006 would be a more telling year.

Have a look into it Phil and give me your assessment.

Yes Sir.

Good. I'll let Admiral Griffin know you'll be delayed coming back. Take care.

I'm sure Griffin will be just delighted to know that I'm off on another one of the CG's frolics, thought Phil sarcastically. I have no idea why Peters would have any interest in this. It’s an ISAF or CENTCOM issue. If I was charitable I'd say he wants me to gently lean on the right people to make sure that they give the Italians all the help they need. That will end up pissing off a bunch of staff weenies along the way. More likely all he wants is to be ahead of the curve and better informed than the others around the table when the Secretary asks what we're doing about this.

Okay. Richter’s at ISAF and can help me through their bureaucracy. Do I call him and get him out of bed or do O'Donnell and I just take a ride down to Kabul?

CHAPTER 2

Camp Julien, Kabul, Afghanistan

Sunday 04 Sep 05 0715 hrs AFT

Breakfast wasn't the best this morning. Greasy eggs, greasy home fries, greasy sausages. Only the coffee was good. The food had been a lot better yesterday so he put it down to either a bad day for the Nepalese cooks or perhaps they were already developing an ENDEX attitude. On operations, just as on training exercises, when things wound down people became less sharp and less dedicated; looking to just skate through to the end and go home. On previous visits he had consistently found the food and the civilian staff here excellent. He was certainly no stranger to Afghanistan.

Kurt had been part of Joint Task Force 2 when it and the 3rd Battalion of the Princess Patricia's Light Infantry deployed with the Americans to southern Afghanistan in late 2001 and early 2002 respectively under what Canada called Operation APOLLO. By mid July 2002, after six months of combat, and as things wound down, they had mostly been withdrawn.

In 2003 they were back. Another two thousand Canadians were committed to ISAF in Kabul under Operation ATHENA. They were in fact the larges single NATO contingent there.