The Hunt for bin Laden

The hunters stalked their prey from the sky and in the shadows, armed with instruments of death and waiting for Osama bin Laden to reveal himself. Above the gnarled ridges outside the besieged cities of Jalalabad and Kandahar, U.S. warplanes unloaded laser-guided Maverick missiles and 5,000-lb. bunker busters to collapse limestone redoubts and bury anyone taking cover inside. Members of the U.S. Army's clandestine 800-man Delta Force tracked likely bin Laden hideouts, equipped with night-vision goggles and stun grenades, in case they had to creep inside the mountains, and laser pointers, in the hope that they could get warplanes to do the dirty, risky work. Bands of local Afghan fighters—whether driven by the desire to rid their country of bin Laden or win the $25 million bounty the U.S. had placed on his head—joined U.S. special-operations forces in the pursuit. Their orders were to shoot to kill. As one Army officer told TIME, "We won't ask him if he wants to surrender."

No one expected he would. From the moment the military launched its manhunt inside Afghanistan, U.S. commanders surmised that bin Laden—like the men he has dispatched on his errands of suicidal terror—would rather endure a fiery death than be captured by the infidels. He has reportedly instructed his closest aides, including his son, to give him the glory of martyrdom and shoot him if the Americans came knocking.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]The swift, shocking transformation of Afghanistan's map last week—as rebel forces seized control of at least two-thirds of the country from the Taliban—made bin Laden's demise seem imminent, even if the Pentagon could not say precisely where he was. With Taliban forces ditching their guns and switching sides by the thousands, American commandos spent last week picking up bin Laden's scent—and nudging the six-week conflict toward a decisive climax. The Taliban faced devastation in its southern strongholds, and that shrank bin Laden's theater of operation. Pashtun operatives showered Western and Pakistani intelligence agents with information about bin Laden's hideouts. Pakistani officials told TIME that U.S. forces, working from reports that Taliban informants gave to Pakistani intelligence agents, have zeroed in on the Tora Bora region near Jalalabad, where bin Laden was thought to have sought the protection of the 1,500 Arab fighters left stranded there by the retreating Taliban. With hunters closing in, he was said to be moving nightly among caves in the honeycombed mountains stretching from Jalalabad to the northern half of the Uruzgan province. American F-15Es, unmanned Predator drones and commando ground troops killed scores of Taliban and al-Qaeda lieutenants, including bin Laden deputy Mohammed Atef, the reputed architect of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The anti-Taliban storm has left the country in a state of "maximum turmoil," as military strategists call it—the ideal environment for American forces to put bin Laden on the run. A huge, nagging fear was that bin Laden would disappear inside Afghanistan, dug in so deep that he could lead the U.S. forces on a long, futile chase. But allied officials exuded more confidence than ever before that they knew where—and how—to get him.

With Kabul in opposition hands and Kandahar, the regime's spiritual center, under siege by opposition Pashtun, the Taliban was on the brink of total collapse. But inside the Pentagon, joy was tempered by the grim knowledge of the threats to American forces on the ground. The pace and scale of the Taliban's retreat last week left U.S. special-ops troops scattered throughout a ravaged land that lacks a central governing authority. Dozens of warlords staked claims to their own pieces of turf, and in several cities, ethnic tensions held the potential for fresh violence. And even as the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Omar, attempted to install his replacements in Kandahar and take to the hills, he vowed to turn his cadre of holy warriors into guerrillas who would fight U.S. forces to the death.

From the start, the administration warned that the war on terrorism would have no obvious endgame. But liquidating bin Laden and his top al-Qaeda henchmen has always been the principal objective of the campaign. The war's chief salesman, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, reiterated on Friday that the U.S. has no territorial designs on a land whose terrain and people sent two empires packing in recent centuries. Once the U.S. decapitates al-Qaeda, the bulk of the American military force will pull out of Afghanistan. "All we need," an Air Force colonel told TIME Thursday, "is for someone to point their finger in the right direction."

Hints coming out of Afghanistan and the Pentagon suggested that bin Laden was desperately trying to avoid his fate. He burrowed into the country's most remote terrain, sheltered by a small band of bodyguards willing to die in his defense. Pakistani intelligence sources told TIME that al-Qaeda survivors were likely to lodge themselves in narrow canyons among the summits, near dried riverbeds shielded from American pilots by boulders and shadows. Some U.S. officials fretted that bin Laden might fake his death.

Inside Afghanistan, swelling ranks of humiliated Taliban commanders fell over themselves offering to give up bin Laden. "People are telling on Al-Qaeda's hideouts," said a diplomat in Pakistan. "They're being systematically annihilated." A Pakistani army officer told TIME that the military and intelligence commands there enlisted former Taliban troops to track bin Laden. "We're certain he's still in Afghanistan," the source said Thursday. But by Saturday, a haze of conflicting reports had settled over the situation. The Taliban's envoy to Pakistan said bin Laden had left Afghanistan with his family—and then promptly took the story back. Pentagon officials considered a bin Laden escape unlikely but not absolutely impossible. A few days before, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had offhandedly mentioned that bin Laden may have tried to sneak out of the country—possibly in a helicopter flying close to the ground and possibly into the tribal areas of Pakistan, from which he could head for a new home in Somalia, Sudan or Yemen. "They could go down one of the valleys and not be detected," Rumsfeld said. "It's not a bottle that you can cork."

But Rumsfeld may have been inviting bin Laden to make a run for it, knowing well that the escape hatches were slamming shut. American patrol planes watched the borders. Pakistan warned its tribal chieftains that it would punish anyone who gave sanctuary to bin Laden. Pakistani officials and American ground troops tightened their surveillance of refugees flowing out of Afghanistan. On Saturday, Pakistani guards at the Chaman border detained three Arab women and their two children trying to cross into Pakistan. The three women, from Yemen, claimed that their Arab husbands had been killed in the U.S. bombing as they fled south from Kabul. A TIME correspondent at the scene said the women wore black burkas of an expensive Saudi design and were interrogated about possible links to al-Qaeda and bin Laden.