The Apaches killed him a few minutes later with another sixty rounds of “thirty mike-mike.” The two who were left moved off northwest. After discussing the situation with the ground force, the Apaches attacked at 11:40 P.M., firing sixty rounds of 30mm chain gun ammunition and killing five of the small group. The Apache pilots decided the men were displaying hostile intent based on the weapons they carried. Armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, the eight men moved off in a northwesterly direction. Half an hour into that movement, the Apaches watched four individuals leave the compound and join four others. The patrol took almost an hour to reach the target compound. The Rangers had a lot of friends in the sky: an air weapons team of two AH-64 Apache attack helicopters an MQ-1 Predator drone an AC-130 gunship an MC-12 Liberty surveillance plane and a PC-12 surveillance plane. The forty-seven-person force landed unopposed about 2,000 meters to the east of the target compound, and proceeded to walk toward it, a patrol that took place at an altitude of between 6,500 and 7,000 feet. The strike force quickly put a plan together and, after getting it cleared through the JSOC chain of command in Afghanistan, launched from Forward Operating Base Shank in neighboring Logar province at 10:37 P.M. Signals intelligence had located Qari Tahir (also known as Objective Lefty Grove) in a compound on the river’s north side at 6:55 that evening. in the Tangi Valley of eastern Wardak province, about thirty-five miles south-southwest of Kabul, was hunting Qari Tahir, who had been the valley’s senior Taliban commander since June 6, when the task force had killed his predecessor, Din Mohammad. The Ranger strike force that landed at 11:01 P.M. It was the middle of the night of August 5, 2011, a little more than three months since the bin Laden raid. The aircraft was coming from the northwest, but approaching quickly. Searching the night sky for its black silhouette, they shouldered their rocket-propelled grenade launchers in order to be ready should it appear. when the men heard the distinctive sound of another twin-rotor helicopter. Two months previously they had volley-fired more than a dozen rocket-propelled grenades at one of the twin-rotor helicopters, forcing it to abort its mission and leave the valley. The Taliban in the valley were getting closer, however. The helicopters were prize targets for the insurgents, but shooting down a blacked-out helicopter on a dark night using the rudimentary sights on a heavy machine gun or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher was not easy. There were also two types of helicopter in the air: the large, twin-rotor ones, a pair of which had landed to the northeast four and a half hours previously, depositing dozens of soldiers who were now scouring a village compound and the smaller attack helicopters, which the men on the tower had heard firing at their colleagues north of the river. For hours their airplanes had been circling above the valley, clearly audible in the still of the night. soldiers built a combat outpost there in spring 2009, but never succeeded in controlling more than a thousand meters around the tiny base, which they abandoned two years later. For years the valley had been inhospitable to invaders. Looking north, they could see the gray outlines of the mud-brick villages dotting the strip of vegetation that in daylight ran like a green ribbon through the center of the valley, but now was just another shade of black. The moon had set and the sky was black as the insurgents on a corner turret of a compound 200 meters south of the Logar River scanned the darkness for targets.
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