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A DAY AT THE CAVES Operation Buzzard has taken the British Royal Marines to Zawarkili, a stone's throw from the Pakistan border. Zawarkili is the site of one of the bin Laden training camps that Clinton hit with cruise missiles after the American embassies in Africa were bombed in 1998. B-52s blasted the hell out of the place again last December, but the cave complex underneath remained basically undamaged. Intelligence officials believe the complex was used within the past six months. The caves honeycomb, zigzag and stretch for a couple of kilometers into the rugged mountainside. One cave in the region (as yet undiscovered) is rumored to tunnel all the way into Pakistan, and to be big enough to drive an SUV through. The British Royal Marines' srategy to deal with this enemy asset is deceptively simple: blow it all to kingdom come. Bill, a British PAO, came to the press tent at night with an offer for reporters: Who wants a chance to visit one of bin Laden's training camps? Bill's not really an enlisted soldier. Maybe he used to be. I'm not sure what he is now, but he has to borrow a sidearm when he wants to enter restricted areas (where sidearms are mandatory), and he's the only man on base who wears a tam-o'-shanter, sporting a puffy green ball on top and a patch of plaid sewn to the side. The British military have been thoroughly excoriated in the British tabloids for hosting operational duds. Most notoriously, in Operation Snipe, British commandos swept through a cave complex near Gardez that had not only been swept by American soldiers previously, but had been poked through by a BBC film crew months earlier. Headlines screamed: PHONEY WAR! HUMILIATED! It's not the Commandos' fault that al Qaeda was devious enough to slip across the border into Pakistan. It's not the British foot soldiers' fault that they have no one to shoot at. It's not even Brigadier Roger Lane's fault that he's directed his soldiers to sweep through areas that appear to be pacified. After Tora Bora, Shah-i Kot and Anaconda, the public's appetite for bloodshed and body counts has been whetted. The British public likes a good war, and when British soldiers sweep through an area, confiscate weapons caches and blow caves, it's as if they're as incompetent as a surgeon who amputates the wrong leg. The Brits can't even scare up enough press to fill their Chinooks. For today's mission, they drew only eight reporters to fill sixteen spots. Wayne from the Daily Mirror, a left wing tabloid, superciliously declines the invitation; he'd rather sit in the superheated press tent and watch baseball on the Armed Forces Network than explore caves at bin Laden's bombed out training camp. For my part, I skip baseball (and breakfast) and climb on the British bird. *** I forego breakfast, due to the puking risk, but I do have a cup of tea with Nell, a bottle-blonde muckraker for the Sun, one of Britain's top-selling tabloids, one with a topless Page 3 girl in every edition. Nell wrote the article about swimsuit model-turned TV reporter Lara Logan being tossed off the base for terrorizing British marines by shamelessly flaunting her gender. An anonymous source from Bagram airbase was quoted as saying: "Lara is a gorgeous-looking woman... but a military base in a war zone is not a place for being flirtatious." The story, improbable as it sounds, ran with a headline, splashed across the front page, that read, PUT THOSE BAZOOKAS AWAY! Nell's Cockney accent is the least of her charms, though her snobby British press corps colleagues look down on her. "They think I'm common," she says. Nell's giggly and gabby, even twitchy, but she's also demure. She fixes me a cup of tea and brings it to me before we take off. What's wrong with that? She dated an American rock star or a British actor at some point, maybe in the '80s; she's fun from the Sun. Mark, a foppish bon vivant from the Financial Times, joins us. "Take plenty of water with you," he says. "I'm bringing eight liters." "So you can take a shower when you get down there?" "You can't have too much water." I bring six half-liter bottles, along with a sleeping bag, two MREs, and a foam bedroll. Even though we are only meant to be away for the day, I have been told to be prepared to sleep out if need be. "Pack light, cold at night," Mark says. On the flight line, we trundle into the gaping maw of a waiting Chinook. The whine of the engines revs up higher, and faster, like a dentist's drill. Choppers always seem to tear off the tarmac with an excess of drama, as if they're under fire, even when they're not. At least I don't think they are. I've heard that chopper guys are sometimes oblivious to the fact that they're being shot at. Why take chances? We soar over the patchwork of farm plots on the Shomali plain, past the rusted rows of derelict tanks, the labyrinths of adobe-walled farm plots. There are no right angles in rural Afghanistan. Every line wavers, every wall curves, every dirt road deviates, even on the straight-aways. I look out the bubble window on the side of the bird. Children spill out of their houses and wave and run after us. No one throws rocks, or spears, or shakes his rifle, as sometimes happens. We cross the mountains, flying low, headed for an area one kilometer from the Pakistani border. Since there's a three-kilometer exclusion zone on either side of the boundary, the Brits secured special permission from Musharaf's government in Islamabad to conduct operations in the area. Over the barren mountains we fly. The pilot banks sharply in the gorges, through valleys and between mountains sometimes so close it seems our rotors could brush up against the rock. We climb over a dramatic mountain range, dotted with pine trees, some of themlying bleached and broken like dinosaur bones, untouched on the remote ridges. Across the aisle from me, Major Hilferty has dozed off. He's got a Ranger tab on his jacket, which to me, means he's been on a thousand Chinook rides, so I follow his example--just close my eyes and nod away. I am awoken by a rough thud. We've touched down in a riverbed. I'm wearing my body armor, but I carry my helmet in my hand. I run down the ramp; the back of my neck is fried by the back draft from the bird's two huge turbine engines. The first thing I notice about the border region is the heat. A stiff breeze rushes through like a blast from a blowdryer. It's early morning, and the heat scorches the moisture right out of the body; it's the kind of heat that you don't even sweat in. The moisture wicks off the skin as soon as it emerges from the pores. The helicopters (Chinooks always travel in pairs) take off and soar overhead, tearing across the wash at low altitude, banking over a low ridge, circling back. They seem to be making a show of it, swooping around in circles, banking exuberantly, frolicking like pent up dogs who have just been let out in the yard. They finally head for the horizon. So now we are officially out in the field. If anything goes wrong, we'll be sticking it out on the border until the helicopters come back to fetch us. The feeling, I imagine, is akin to being set adrift on the ocean in a dingy. We are very deep into the Pashtun belt, which straddles the border that al Qaeda is assumed to have slinked through. Eastern Afghanistan is the premier hotspot for enemy activity. That's why the Brits are here--to neutralize assets. British soldiers are bivouacked along the edge of the wash, at the foot of a rocky palisade, whacked out under tents. Some have dug themselves in, seeking cool escape from the broiling sun. Several have shoveled pits the size of bathtubs, then stretched camouflage ponchos, like animal skins being cured, skewered on four stakes. A motor pool has gathered to take us to the caves. Two are Wimmicks, British military station wagons, with four wheels, high suspension, and a narrow, European chassis. Two others are fighting Land Rovers with roll bars, each mounted with 50 cals on top (stripped from old WWII spitfires) and a 5.56 mm. belt-fed machine gun for the guy riding shotgun. Mean looking machines. Falling in are four men on four-wheeled dune buggies. I climb on a Wimmick with a British TV crew, Mark, from the Financial Times, and Major Bryan Hilferty. "So, Bryan," I ask, "what's the deal with an operation like this? How do you make sure al Qaeda won't come back when the Brits pull out?" "They don't know when we're coming. They're not going to set up camp here if at any time three hundred Royal Marines could be going through here." He pauses for a moment, then adds, "We hope they do come back. So we can capture and kill the motherfuckers." The caravan grinds across the gravel floor of the gully, then hauls up a bumpy dirt road that winds up into the hills. With each turn, I spot British soldiers in ones and twos crouched behind rocks, hidden under camouflage ponchos. Always too late; if I'd been an intruder, or a recon unit from an invading army, I'd be dead. Capping a hillside, a web of tan tactical netting shades an observation post. Colonel Ben Curry stops the caravan so we can chat with some of his marines. I amble up the valley floor to an encampment that belongs to a pair of British engineers. Jim, his first few days in Afghanistan, a kid, 19 years old, with a doughy face, pale skin, a foppish shock of hair and a long, fleshy nose. Dan is tan, slightly older; his head and chin are shaved to an equal length of blonde stubble. Blue eyes brighten his weathered face. They share a tent; they've lined rocks into three walls, and an entrance. Dan eats a gray paste out of a tin can; it looks a lot like cat food. Jim sits cross-legged, hugging his knees. I ask them how they like Afghanistan. "It's hot." "What do you do to stay cool?" "We don't stay cool. It's hot." "Why don't you camp on the hilltops? You'd get a breeze up there." "We have to camp in the flats. We'd make a profile for snipers on the hills. So we have to stay down here and cook." I seem to be depressing them; so I turn to a new icebreaker. "You guys seen any action? Anything dangerous happening?" "We saw one of those camel spiders back there," Dan says, gesturing to a hillside behind him. "That was bad. I hate spiders." Camel spiders are monstrous beasts, huge arachnids with beady eyes and hairy legs and grossly enlarged mouthparts. They're actually solpugids, not spiders. They don't produce venom or silk. But they're beastly, and Afghanistan is crawling with them, especially at night. It's tough to sleep on the ground with them around. "What about enemy activity? Have you seen anything?" "Nothing," Jim says. "Bloody well nothing." I seem to be depressing the guys once again. We bullshit about the World Cup, about the length of their deployment. They tell me about being engineers. As we talk, I drink from my water bottle; the water is already hot enough to steep tea, just from being in the sun. Neither engineer seems to be very comfortable being interviewed. I ask what they think England is doing in Afghanistan. "I don't know," Jim says. "What's your best guess?" "I suppose we're here to support the United States." "We're sucking up to Uncle Sam," calls a voice from a nearby bivouac. The English media have waged holy war against Britain's deployment in Afghanistan, with some editorialists reducing the UK campaign to an ego ploy on the part of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Ministry of Defense has spent 65 million pounds so far on their Asian adventure, but they weren't attacked on September 11th, and their decision to put British lives on the line for the sake of solidarity with the US seemed sentimental, or calculated, or toadying. A few Afghans filter down the wash, walking in single file. "Where do they come from?" Dan asks. It's a question that begs to be asked. The appearance of an armed file is very Afghan--you're in an incredibly remote area, miles from any settlement, and people with guns materialize out of nowhere. One of the Afghans is a border guard. He is better armed than most in Afghanistan, who are content to strap on an Ak-47, with no more ammo than the 30-round clip in the gun. This guy wears a bandolier stuffed with eight extra magazines. "Have you been attacked?" I ask him. "Yes, of course?" "When?" "One week ago. They shot at us with rockets first, and then with machine guns." "Who?" "The tourists." "Tourist" is the local term for al Qaeda, so-called because they came to Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China, Chechnya and so on. But no one has heard about an attack on a border post. It hasn't made the news. Either the guy is lying, or he's telling the truth. We climb back on the Wimmicks and wind up hill, bumping hard, getting blasted by the sun. I pull a cool bottle of water out of the bottom of my bag and drink it down. I also eat a metal packet of spaghetti from my MRE. And drink another bottle of water. Caves appear high on the canyon walls. We stop after a stretch where the road narrows between two rocky hillsides and passes alongside three cave entrances. Water trickles down, and pools in parts, from an unknown source. Four black cows munch grass outside the openings of the caves. The entrances are brick archways. No real attempt was made to hide them. A dirt path leads from the road up the rock face and into the mouths. A series of shallow steps descend into the cave. The cave stretches about 40 feet straight back. A brick nook, apparently an altar, is set in the back wall. Burnt matches litter the lip of the nook. The most noteworthy item in the cave, the thing that is impossible to miss, is the arrangement of explosives. Stacked in the midpoint of the cave is a pile of rocks, and stacked on top of the rocks are dark green hemp sandbags, and on top of that a neat placement of anti-tank mines, long and narrow, like chocolate bars. They're packed with P-4, plastic explosives. The P-4 is crumbled in white chunks that litter the sandbags and the floor around the bomb. A dark gallery runs off the body of the cave to another cave nearby. I step into the murk, and a soldier points at the ground and warns, "Don't step on the det cord." Det cord? A gray cable stretches from the huge stack of plastic explosives and disappears into the darkness of the gallery. It's the umbilical cord that connects all of the charges that have been set in the cave complex to the detonator outside. I creep through the murk and come to a second cave, identical to the first, also with a crude construction that lifts a mass of high explosives to within a foot of the ceiling. The floor has been totally swept clean, except for a single 50-caliber bullet. This is the bullet, five inches long, heavy, tapering to a point, that snipers use now in their rifles. I pull a chip off the cave wall and pocket it--a rock from bin Laden's caves. Also a small red plastic picture frame, maybe from the shrine. A third gallery leads to a third cave. A few British soldiers stand at ease. One of them cradles a three-foot-long monitor lizard. He caught it outside the caves, and he plans to transport it away to make sure it isn't obliterated. "I'll put him back after it's all done," he says. "We can't abide cruelty to animals." "You guys are a bunch of softies," Major Hilferty says. Major Laurence Williams is the advisor to 59 engineers; his job is to place the three tons of main charges around the caves, along with tamping charges to contain the blast and make sure that the rubble doesn't block access to the road. "We're using commercial explosives, one half ton at each cave, and smaller charges will contain the main blast. All force goes up. The commercial explosives have greater shattering effect. That's what you need with this reinforced concrete, and the well-constructed masonry arch. These caves have survived direct hits. You can tell by the spalling in the ceiling." Chunks have been knocked out of the ceiling, like plaster giving way in a leaky roof. I pass back and forth through the caves and galleries until I notice that they're empty. Everyone's gone. Seems like a great time to get the hell out of the caves. I reunite with the group outside and we start to drive again, this time up a steep, winding rutted mountain road. After a while, the Wimmicks are in danger of tipping; so we climb out and walk. On the way up, I talk with the commander of the British troops on the ground, Colonel Tim Chicken. Colonel Chicken is a young man, maybe in his mid-thirties. His eyes are hard and bright, and his eyebrows arch slightly. That is the only birdlike thing about him. When not in the field, he's a sharp-eyed, square jawed soldier. In the field, his chin is grizzled with a three-week light brown beard. His attitude could best be described as bemused. "Who would go to all the trouble of building this road? Why not just have a camel track?" I ask Colonel Chicken. "Well, I don't really know. If it was us, we wouldn't go to the trouble. We'd just have a footpath, as you said. But the Taliban, you know their favorite vehicle was the SUV." "But what were they doing up here?" "It's a good place for guns, good for an OP." Chicken points to the scattered border posts on the hilltops. An army could pass between them and no one would know. One of the hillsides, dotted with trees, represents the Pakistani border. This is beautiful country, and the hike we are on as the kind of thing mountaineering enthusiasts dream of. The only way an American can hike these mountains and not worry about being killed or kidnapped is with 300 coalition soldiers around ready to kill. As it is, about 20 soldiers, armed with A-2 rifles, accompany us on our hike. The rest of 45 Commando is dispersed around the area. I feel safe. Colonel Chicken suddenly asks who I work for. "Hustler." "Isn't that a girlie magazine?" "Yes." "Then why are you here?" "The war." This is a generic conversation, one I've had maybe three or four hundred times since arriving in Afghanistan. Chicken doesn't hold Hustler against me; this is in dramatic contrast to the reception I received when the Brits first arrived. Colonel Harradine, the main Brit PAO, decided that Hustler would never accompany the pride of the British Marines into the field. "Harradine says you're a cunt," one reporter told me. "Don't bother asking to go out with them, because he's already decided you're not going." From the brisk pace he sets, Colonel Chicken seems acclimated to the altitude. I am short of breath, but I push not to lag behind. A cluster of boulders tops the hill. I sit on the rocks and drink a bottle of water, taking in the scenery. The hill behind us is in Pakistan. In front of me, hilltops are dotted with border posts. Each hillside has a dirt road running along its spine. We assemble, wait for the stragglers, the TV people, who set up their tripods. Nell, the reporter from the Sun, is handed a console that looks like a walkie-talkie. A soldier with a bushy moustache walks her through the procedure--push both those buttons at the same time. Nell will be doing the honors this afternoon. Maj. Lawrence Williams does the countdown. "15...5...standby... firing...now." Nell blows the caves we were just standing in. There is a silent flash of fire, an orange fireball, then a billow of gray smoke, followed by a huge shock wave, and finally the concussive crack of the explosion. The detonation seems to unfold in slow motion. Nell screams. "Oh, I did it," she says. "Wow." The Brits are glad the thing went off. They were afraid to be embarrassed again in front of the world's press. We hike back down the mountain, hop in a Wimmick, and drive up the canyon to another cave complex. We pass a palisade cliff with a number of brick arched cave entrances in front. A fake village had been placed to disguise the cave entrances. The ploy didn't fool the US Joint Direct Attack Munitions, precision guided munitions, which leveled the place, leaving only bricks, colorful, gay, painted tiles, and a few jagged foundations reaching for the sky. The main entrance to the cave is spray painted yellow, and EOD is written in large letters outside, meaning unexploded ordnance. Scraps of paper, with Arabic writing on them, are scattered about. A sapper has sprayed yellow lines in the sand between pools of shells and blasting caps--a path of safe passage through the explosive debris. At the cave entrance, an array of booty is laid out on the sand: a 100mm Russian tank projectile (with fins that deploy when the shell leaves the breach) a Chinese recoilless round, and a graduated display of small arms ammunition, scaling down from a 50-cal shell to a 7.62 bullet. Sprinkled in are blasting caps and a collection of Chinese and Russian anti-personnel mines. "What we have here is a just very small selection of what we've found," says Colin Williams. Pinned to the ground by bullets is a scrap of paper bearing an extreme Islamic fundamentalist emblem: a pair of crossed rifles with the rising sun. Soldiers lounge at the entrance to the cave; a strong, cool breeze blows from the depths. I fall in behind Staff Sergeant Colin Hill, 35, the chief engineer in charge of demolition. I ask him what he does when he's not blowing things up. "I run dog sleds," he says. "If I could just squeeze by..." We enter the cave. Splinters of wood, and a spill of bricks, blown from an archway, litter the entrance. The cave immediately splits, with shafts running in either direction. The only light comes from the headlamp of Sgt. Hill, which casts a circle of light on the innards of the tunnels, which are remarkably uniform, high, with rounded ceilings and low clearance at junctures. "The caves are very well made," Hill says. "They've all been hit with direct hits. You can see the craters on top of this hill. There's some collapse of the roof, caused by the bombs going off on top of us, going through the rock strata, but there's very little damage. Large air-drop bombs will have a spalling effect on the ceiling, but I think you'll agree it's fairly intact. But the wave going through just rips everything up." "So you think the people in the cave might not have survived?" "The survivors would not have been a pretty sight." Underfoot, the sound of crunching glass and cracked bricks. Some galleries smell like dirt, others faintly of spices, the smell of cordite. A strong cool breeze blows from the depths of the cave. "You can feel the flow of air as well," Hill says. "The way they've constructed it, with vents and ducts all the way through here, the flow of air passes through the entire cave. Watch your head there--another one of those vaulted passageways--watch your head. If you look at the side here, you can see the individual pick-marks on the wall; the whole thing has been done by hand." Sgt. Hill points at the ceiling to show me the marks left by pickaxes; they look like claw marks from a trapped cat. The right hand cave ends after 150 meters at a cave in; the tunnel is blocked, demolished by an American bombing raid from early in the war. We double back the other way. The cave extends for a long stretch; we step over loose debris--bricks and broken ammunition crates that crackle underfoot. Green phosphorescent glow sticks mark the midpoint and the end point of the gallery. The second stick is higher than the first, suggesting an upward incline. I step forward in the dark, into the steady cool breeze, and the strong, earthy smell of the underground. "We actually found quite a bit of bulk explosives down this tunnel, but we've cleared them out so there's safe passage," Hill says. "In an hour and a half we cleared no more than 60 meters--there's that many offshoots. We'll go as far as we can." I ask if any of the ordnance was booby-trapped. When US soldiers swept through battlefields following Tora Bora and Shah-i Kot, some of the al Qaeda bodies they found were rigged with land mines. Even dead horses were mined. "We have to treat everything as if it's fully booby-trapped," Hill says. "Let's face it: It's a former AQ facility." I ask if they found anything other than ammo in the caves. "We've found quite a bit of literature--letters with the rising sun and crossed rifles, laurel crest, some letterhead with bin Laden on a walkie talkie. We found a magazine with all the photos blacked out of fundamentalist people with AK-47. All the faces were blacked out." These caves were initially dug by the mujahedin, with help from the United States, during the Soviet war. This is a key smuggling route; perhaps the locals were keeping the Brits from finding this one, since it's a key thoroughfare that they didn't want loused up. The cave turns, veers at a right angle, another turn, a sharp, 90-degree turn. These twists aren't arbitrary, or following the grain of the rock. They are designed to counteract the force of blast waves. One of the reasons these caves are so invulnerable to bombs is that they are engineered to contain blast waves from bombs, to allow only a minimum of damage, mostly spalling to the roof. There is another three-way divide in the cave; to the left, a gallery of living quarters the size of prison cells. Catacombs, on either side, branch out. Sgt. Hill gestures into a murky chamber on my right. "This would be the toilet here. I believe slightly caved in, with an ornate flushing facility--a jerry can." We walk into a tiny cell across the hall from the shitter. Hill scans it with his lamp. On the floor, shreds of patchwork quilted blankets, made of whimsical pieces of fabric, but all shredded, as if by a rat in a cage. Everything is broken. A large aluminum teapot, with fluted sides, has a bite taken out of it by a blast. The survivors must not have been a pretty sight. "We've got bedding in here, personal effects, decayed, religious artifacts, found some uniforms, camo jackets, looked no older than six months. A lot of the accommodations are partly rubble filled." I notice an electric socket dangling from the ceiling. "Was there electricity in here?" "Definitely," Hill says. "When mujahedin built these, they put in power. Since then, some of the antechambers have brand new bulbs in sockets. Right up until a few months ago, there was certainly power in here. Off generators. In some areas they poked antennae through to the outside so they could get communications." We go further, down the third branch. The cool breeze blows the strongest from down this way; down in the depths of the cave, where the vaulted mosque was, the offices, the kitchens, the way to Pakistan perhaps. Ragged scraps of paper scribbled with Dari carpet the ground. "The antechamber is a long way in. It's a communal area or a mosque," Hills says. "There's some bulk explosives, various fuses, mortar shells so we can't let you go any further." I look down the corridor. It's littered with wooden ammunition crates. We backtrack to the main branch, like a heart, with arteries jutting out on three sides. I run my hand along the wall; the sides are friable. I imagine the sand falling from the walls during the bombing campaigns, like a rain of pebbles and bits of dirt. A USMC Captain once told me the story of watching the bombing runs during Tora Bora on night vision scopes. After the bombing runs, the Taliban and al Qaeda would come out of the caves and dance a victory dance, and moon their enemy, dance around yipping and laughing, and then dash back into the caves. The procedure was so routine that American military planners devised an attack specifically for the dancers. They timed the average length after the final bomb had fallen, to the time the Taliban came out of the cave and started dancing. The next time, they called the bombing run in at a precise time, and had 81 mm. mortars ready to be shot off. The bombs fell, the mortars went down the tubes. While the mortars were still in the air, the Taliban, true to their pattern, danced out of their caves. After the mortar shells landed, the Marines looked through their scopes. "All we could see were thermal splotches outside the cave. Just these green blobs." A green blob is what a person looks like after he's been blown apart by high explosives and then looked at through a night vision scope. We emerge back into the heat of day. Someday soon, after the cave has been fully explored, Colin Hill will drop the entrances, 15 of them foundso far. We climb back on the Wimmicks, and the caravan winds through the riverbed. Around a bend in the evaporated river, and we're back at the original wash where we set down in the morning. I have half a bottle of water left, and I save it for the ride home. We sit on the side of the wash and wait for the helicopters. Only half an hour later I hear the thump of the birds, always traveling in twos. One Chinook touches down in the middle of the gully, sending up a billow of dust. Except it's not dust; it's rocks. I watch the cloud approach like an ocean wave. I have time to pull on my helmet, and note with satisfaction the ballistic plates in my bullet-proof vest. The wave hits; I'm pelted with rocks. It hurts like hell, and keeps hurting. In the middle of the shit storm, I take a moment to reconsider. The helicopters rotors are spinning, and the gully's probably not going to run out of gravel; I get up and run. My helmet is blown off my head and shoots down the wash. The back flap of my jacket, which is heavy as lead, whips up and smacks me in the head. Finally the helicopter's engines cut out, and the pebbles stop flying. Everyone is covered in a fine dusting of dirt, like a Milano cookie. Time to climb on board. I'm battered, but satisfied. It's been a great day. I sip the last of my water on the long flight home. The whole flight home I'm thirsty as hell, but I can't bring myself to ask Mark for one of his waters. Bastard was right. Next time I'll bring twice as much. |
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