Three Brothers (Paperback)

About the Author: Jörg H. Trauboth was born just outside of Berlin in 1943 during an air-raid. He discovered his love for writing early in his career as an officer and was awarded top honors by the General Inspector of the German Bundeswehr. Along the way, he accumulated over two thousand flight hours as a weapons systems officer and instructor in the Phantom F-4F/RF-E4 and the Tornado aircrafts. Trauboth become a General Staff Officer in Hamburg-Blankenese and enrolled in the NATO Defense College in Rome. He has served in the German national operational headquarters as well as in the NATO Headquarters in Brussels as the German representative in the areas of Crisis Management, Operations, and Intelligence. At the age of fifty, he retired early from his post as a colonel in the German Air Force to become a Special Risk Consultant at the Control Risk Group in London and was engaged in negotiating extortion and kidnapping situations in South America and Eastern Europe. The former colonel, eager to start making money on his own and contribute to society, soon founded the Trauboth Risk Management company. He received a startup award for his company and quickly made a reputation for himself internationally as an top-notch crisis manager. During his time as CEO, he conceptualized crisis prevention strategies for a number of European companies and employed a 24-hour task force to protect them from product tampering, product recalls, kidnappings, and image crises. He was also a co-founder and the first president of the European Crisis Management Academy in Vienna and wrote a standard reference book on the subject of crisis management for companies at risk of threat. Jörg H. Trauboth is an author, filmmaker, and an enthusiastic pilot. He has served as the European Director and President of the international American Pilots Organization. His advice on crisis management remains continually sought after and he has appeared in many television interviews regarding his opinion on current international crisis situations. He is married, has two sons, three grandchildren, and lives with his wife near Bonn, Germany. In addition, Trauboth voluntarily contributes his time and expertise to the Crisis Invention Team of the German Federal Foreign Office in Bonn. www.traubothautor.de

Chapter 1 Afghanistan For the last five hours, a group of six men have been trudging through the dark, barren landscape of the vast Hindu Kush Mountains. The distant howling of a lone wolf accompanies them as does the cold wind, but the men don't seem to feel the sting. One of them stops abruptly. Marc Anderson, captain of the German KSK Special Forces Commando, raises his hand to his neck and decisively whispers into his throat mic. "George, I see her. The nose of the aircraft is at eleven o'clock, the tail at two." George, the short, wiry Navy Seal One squad leader from Ohio, folds down the night vision lens mounted on his helmet. For whatever reason, the fighter jet did not explode, but the debris is still smoldering. "Copy that, I'll inform Bagram Air Base." "Charlie Force from Echo Force - over." "Echo Team go ahead over." "We found the jet - now searching for the crew - over." "Roger Echo Team - we're waiting for your response - over." As unorthodox as it is, the Navy Seals insisted on having German elite soldier Marc Anderson with them on the mission. He is one of the few soldiers who knows the area, located deep in the hinterlands of Afghanistan, better than anyone else on account of a number of earlier missions in the region. At only 27 years old, the tall, slender soldier from the southern German town of Calw has already achieved legendary status among the American and British Special Forces. Together with the Navy Seals, he has succeeded in rescuing and retrieving American soldiers from behind enemy lines, securing himself a formidable reputation as both a leader and a team player. But Anderson refused to do the job on his own: "Only if I can take my commando brothers with me," he told the commanders at Bagram Air Base. "Only with Thomas and Tim." "OK, Marc, agreed." The Seals know full well what "Band of Brothers" means. Elite soldiers throughout all the Special Armed Forces are not just comrades, they are brothers. On this mission - the search for a U.S. fighter jet gone missing along with its crew - the Seals have three German brothers. Nationalities play no role, however, only professionalism and unconditional trust. Marc also agreed to the mission since he and George have worked well together on previous missions. Echo Force, made up of U.S. Seals One, Two, Three, and the German KSK soldiers Marc, Thomas, and Tim, had parachuted in during night. They chose a landing site six and a half miles from the F-15E Strike Eagle's last known position in the hope of not being discovered by the Taliban. There were no exact coordinates of the crash site. What's worse, they weren't able to receive any location transmission from the crew. The pilot had only managed to transmit "No engine - Mayday - Mayday - Bailing out!" at the last minute as they lost altitude. A hasty final message, nothing more. Everything seems to have happened very quickly. The crew must have needed to abandon the aircraft immediately, there would have been no time for discussion. After a successful landing, they spent the next five hours systematically scouring the possible search site of twelve square miles at almost ten thousand feet altitude. Marc was a true pathfinder in this unwieldy and perilous terrain. The Americans trusted him whole-heartedly, and with good reason, as he proved once again. He immediately found the wreckage of the F-15 in the pitch-dark of night and undetected in this hostile territory. They operate meticulously together, as though they have done this a million times before: Marc out in front, checking the terrain, giving signals, the other five men following, step for step, crouched down, secure, silent. The stillness of the dark magnifies every word and any misstep on the gravel is a potential giveaway for the Taliban. While George now relays the coordinates to the American intervention force standing by, Marc scans the crash site with his telescope. The F-15 was not shot down but crashed due to te