by Gabi Moore
With the coast clear, we popped the lock on a basement latch and ducked into the building.
The room was dark and smelled like a mixture of metal filings, dust, and the water from the channel. Not a single member of the team made a sound, as we cleared the basement. There weren’t any signs of lie present within the lowest floor of the building.
When we reached the inner stairwell which lead up from the basement, we knew something wasn’t right.
Joel had actually been the first to notice the sound, and the rest of us caught on quickly. A faint sound of crying could be heard through the thick door, and down into the stairwell of the basement. The crying sounded like it was coming from a child.
I began to grow uneasy.
Civilian presence went against the diagnostic plans we had made for our strike. The SEAL team is designed to be adaptive for all possible scenarios. Naturally, we needed to push forward, but I could tell that the rest of the team mirrored my anxiety in moving forward. When an element of civilian vulnerability is introduced into a strike scenario, the stakes are raised. The initial bravado of the attack is replaced by a more pensive and cautious sentiment.
The door which lead toward the first floor of the warehouse was latched shut from the other side with a deadbolt. Our security specialist produced some military grade lock pick equipment from a leather case attached to his belt and made short work of the deadbolt.
In spite of how quiet we had been throughout the entrance to the building, and in spite of the precautionary oil that was placed on the hinges, the door blew our cover.
The rusted hinges creaked sharply when the door to the main room was opened. The sounds of crying stopped and my heartbeat began to thump wildly in my chest.
Chapter 5 - Tyler
I breathed in deeply through my nose, in an effort to calm myself and regain the level of focus which was required by our mission. The air held the anxiety of the group. Though our training prepared us, the stakes inherent to the situation were getting higher by the minute.
With our weapons drawn, we prepared to enter the first floor, and engage.
I lead the group through the door and made myself vulnerable to the primary attack. The four other members of my team followed me through the door and posted up at the positions mandated by our formula of operation.
We were able to clear the room with little effort, though the dispositions of the hostages were disconcerting, to say the least.
They were bound and gagged around a central pillar in the middle of a vacant floor. There were no other furnishings, and each of them was made to hold their hands above their head. Manacles were around each of their wrists, and rags were stuffed inside of their mouths. I watched their tears out of the corner of my eye as we secured the perimeter of the room.
With no sign of enemy combatants, we posted one man at the first-floor entrance, and one man at the entrance to the stairwell which lead up to the second floor.
Our security man worked through the crowd of seven hostages one at a time, removing their manacles, while Joel offered his consolations.
I remember hearing how soft and gentle he was while he interacted with the hostages. There were three men, three women, and one child in total. I remember being baffled at the hostage selection.
What type of person involves a child in a hostage situation, I thought.
I still recall the way the child’s eyes looked when they were being freed.
There was hardly any trust left within his eyes. The hostage situation had nearly stripped him down to a base level of fear. He didn’t even respond well to Joel’s sympathetic gestures and had to be consoled by one of the women who were set free. We tried to quiet the child down, but we were not successful. In retrospect, we should have simply left the gag in place before we left. Unfortunately, hindsight doesn’t provide any tools to fix previous mistakes.
We managed to undo four of the hostages before the child became too loud, and blew our cover. Even Joel lost his patience and forced the woman who was caring for the child to wrap her hand around the child’s mouth.
The sounds of men walking down the stairs set my nerves on edge. Combat was an inevitable reality, and we were primed to explode.
I grabbed the woman and child by the arm and dragged them over to the basement entrance. Joel followed suit and grabbed the two other women that had been freed by their arms.
We thrust them into the basement.
When I turned around to engage, I had to avoid the eyes of the three men that we couldn’t save. I knew that tears were rolling down their cheeks in that moment.
I’m sure that some of those tears were for the hopelessness present for them in that situation. There was no time to free them, and the chance of them dying in the crossfire was, unfortunately, high. My guess was that if they cried at all, it was because they could have been in a position to fight against their assailants. Instead, they were left helpless, and largely indefensible.
We could all hear the approaching boots on the concrete stairs. The sounds were the proverbial words written on the wall.
Our only chance was to prepare to strike first and hope that our training was sufficient enough to compensate for our lack of surprise advantage.
Joel and I were in a poor starting position when the attack first went off. I had to find an appropriate place for the most vulnerable of the hostages. I know that Joel felt the same way; that was humanity, not training.
With three guns leveled toward the entrance to the second-floor stairwell, the first few members of the opposing force made their way through the door.
The attack started with a single point of entry.
A lone gunman walked through the door. He had a black bandana wrapped around his face, and he carried a semi-automatic rifle. I heard the man begin to shout in Italian about how three of the hostages were missing, but his voice was truncated by a single shot of a silenced pistol. Even with the silencer, the weapon was loud enough to signal to everyone in the area that a gunfight had begun.
The man’s voice trailed off in a gurgle, as he choked on the blood seeping out from his neck.
The man who was covering the door shot low for the head and ripped open the man’s neck with a single bullet. As his body slumped against the wall of the stairwell, more voices went off in alarm. Those soldiers who remained in the hallway didn’t pour out to meet their fate as the others had but instead barked orders to regroup, and modify their attack. The first man’s life had amounted to warning flag for the benefit of his fellow terrorists.
I would have hated to have the sum of my life be a warning shot, but you get what you are looking for, as they say. Perhaps, he thought he was doing God’s work.
I still remember the loud noises made by the voices of the terrorists. Subtlety was completely absent in their procedure. I grew arrogant in that moment, thinking that they were amateurs.
Our team rushed to the door to position ourselves on either side of the stairwell. We knew better than take the enemy from low ground, and held our position in spite of the fact that we were itching to finish this battle quickly.
Standard operating procedure is to shut the lower door, or clear enough of a path so that in the event of a grenade, there is enough room to escape. Accessing the door wasn’t an option, and if we cleared a wider path, not only would we be in danger of getting shot, but we would be in the bullet path for the hostages, and the certainty of incidental casualties would increase.
A grenade bounced off of the floor at the bottom of the stairs and skidded across the room toward the central pillar.
My heart dropped into my stomach, and I watched as Joel dove toward the grenade. He tried to cover the blast up with his body or kick it out of the way if there was enough time. I knew there wouldn’t be enough time to manage and when I saw Joel head over toward the grenade, I knew that it would be the last time that I saw him alive.
Heroes are different than humanitarians, or at least, they are not always the same thing
.
When the grenade went off, the three men were blasted with a spray of blood from Joel’s now shattered body. The life was gone from his body, but what was shocking was that the explosion was sequenced and much larger than I had anticipated. A series of explosions went off near the central pillar, as though coming from within the pillar itself.
I watched as the lights of the explosion illuminated the entire room, sending scatter shots of marble and concrete into the air around us. The three men attached to the pillar didn’t have a prayer of survival. There was only one thought in my mind, and it wasn’t even my own survival or the safety of the team.
Why? was all my mind was able to articulate.
I couldn’t understand why the terrorists would eliminate the hostages.
The chaos of the explosion knocked the remaining members of the team into the wall closest to the stairwell. We were losing ground and our composure.
While we were caught off balance, the remaining members of the terrorist team came down the stairs and opened fire. They were walking into a pincer attack, but unfortunately for our team, the firefight ended up causing casualties on both sides through friendly fire, as well as through enemy engagement.
As much as I don't like to say it, our training went out the window in the height of that emotionally volatile situation. We lost our cool and opened fire. The results of our actions were a series of loud explosions erupting from the barrels of our weapons.
Following the gun blasts, there was also the sound of blood splattering on the wall. There were cries that rose into the air while the bodies were falling down to the floor.
I thought about the two women and the child in the basement. I prayed that they would find some way to escape and that they would stay well out of the way of the firefight.
The terrorist group continued to pour down the stairwell, and we were overwhelmed by their numbers.
When considering the general theme of the events to follow, I can only imagine how much more valuable it would've been to be consciously responsive, instead of instinctually operative.
There's a certain type of movement that takes place when the body reaches a peak state of arousal. Time tends to stop, and all actions around me become slow motion. I can only attribute this to the endless amount of training that I performed as a SEAL operative. The trance state saved my life to be sure, but I can’t help but wonder if things would have ended up differently if we had all retained a bit more control of our awareness.
Both bodies and shell casings hit the floor, and I was in a state of meditative purity. Only two people were standing at the end of this second assault. One other operative from the team and myself are eliminated the entire terrorist threat. The initial threat had been eliminated, the casualties were great, but the conflict was not over.
The remaining soldier and I turned to see the door first floor burst open, revealing a SWAT Team of Italian Police Officers.
The SWAT Team wasted no time in making immediate snap decisions about who we were, and why we were in the building.
We didn't have jurisdiction here, and this project was an off-the-record situation. As a result, there could be no way for us to maintain our cover while engaging with the police. We were caught in a bad place, without any of the options available that would have alleviated the impending conflict.
Both the remaining teammate and I were fluent in Italian. Realizing that the situation did not look good, and would not look any better in the near future, my teammate called out in Italian. He tried to address the police directly. To share with them why we were on the premises, and to assure them that we were not in fact a threat.
The police were not interested in anything we had to say. They commanded that we drop our weapons.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw some movement on the upper platforms of the stairwell. One of the remaining terrorists was alive and was raising a weapon toward the only remaining member of my team.
Without thinking, I turned around, aimed, and fired. My snap decision brought the terrorist ground. His body slumped down the stairwell, leaving me to passively listen to the police yell, and raise their own weapons into the air. Another shot went off before the police could fire; the sound had come from our side of the room.
In the face of an aggressive Italian SWAT Team, my teammate had opted to fire first, before being fired upon. In retrospect, I don’t blame him. In all reality, that decision of his probably saved my life.
We were all caught up in a situation that we didn't have any control over. There was no way that we could've known the hostages would be used as a decoy; as a mere explosive spectacle to flag the SWAT Team. There was no way we could've known that the police would be present to arrive at the situation so quickly. There is no way we could have known how many hostages were present, or how many opponents were within the stairwell. We did the best that we could given the situation, but when push comes to shove, our intel was wrong. What we could not have known was no longer relevant. The only things that remained relevant were the conflagration of circumstances which brought me into amnesia. I was the last man of my team, turning tail and running, with an Italian SWAT Team hot on my trail.
I sprinted up the stairwell, keeping an eye out for anyone that might be there in my past, but they were already dead. When I got to the top floor, I burst through the opening on the roof. Realizing that there was only one exit from this point I sprinted toward the edge closest to the dock.
My only hope was that I would be able to dive into the water below. Obviously, I didn't make it all away. As luck would have it, the bullet that found its way toward me only grazed the side of my skull. Flying through the air in a semiconscious state, my body met the water.
After that moment, all I knew was silence.
With my mind clear, I was able to go into the next room and sit down to share my newfound awareness with the old man who had rescued me.
I took a deep breath and looked at him from across the table. It was obvious that he was worn. He appeared both meditative, and under high levels of stress. His eyes were fixated on the bag which is daughter had left in his keeping.
I wasn't certain how much information to share with him, and how much information I should keep to myself.
I decided to air on the side of caution.
Chapter 6 - Tyler
"If the police are after me,” I began, “and you thought that I was responsible for the lives of those men and for the current whereabouts of those women and that child, then why did you let me live?"
My hands were folded on the table, and I made direct eye contact with him. I had to know where he stood on the matter before moving forward in any capacity.
"Let's just say I don't always agree with the story that's provided to me by the police. Besides, if I wanted you in prison, all I had to do was inform the police of your whereabouts, which wouldn't have been too much of a problem. Even if you had killed me, the chances of you getting off this island without police awareness are slim to none."
The man laughed.
I figured that he was some kind of manic conspiracy theorist, but then I thought about the situation more thoroughly. It seemed likely that his intuition was correct. He hadn’t turned me in, and had I killed him, I would have been an amnesiac in a lot of trouble. I woke up at no idea where I was at, or what was going on in the world around me. I could've figured it out. I'm sure my training would have kicked in eventually. However in the larger scheme of things, having no money, no passport, no weapon, no identification, and a warrant for my arrest — what a fucking challenge that would have been.
The man sat there, rolling his stubbed out cigarette in his hand. He had a pensive look on his face, and the room smelled like ash. The fisherman nodded to himself, as though he were forming a conclusion in his mind.
"I know what you need, and I know how you're going to get it, but it's not going to be easy."
"I agree with you," I said. "I don't think anything here on out is going to be
easy, not until I get stateside, and even then, I’ll have to answer for a flopped mission and collateral damage.”
"I don't expect you to tell me everything,” the man said, “but I would at least like to know if you're innocent."
He was staring at me from across the table, and I could tell that there was more to be had in our conversation, but he wanted to get something clear first. I couldn't turn him down. I understood why he would want to have that kind of clarity.
When you stick your neck out for someone, you want them to be able to respond to you. You want them to be able to justify why your behaviors were in alignment with a greater good. I knew that responding to this man's questions were just as relevant to the safety of the public as they were to his own ethical navigation.
I shook my head.
"I didn't kill any hostages. At the very least, I can tell you that with certainty. My team and I--”
"So there are more of you," he asked, raising his eyebrows in alarm.
“Not anymore. Seeing my weapon and the dog tags jogged my memory. If my mind can be trusted, I think I was the only one that made it out.“
The man nodded grimly.
“Then, you're aware that the police sustained injuries as well.”
"Of course," I replied, thinking about the final attack on the terrorist who had approached our team from behind the stairs.
If I hadn't taken the initiative to shoot that person, it's likely that they would have shot us both or the very least they would've shot my friend. The police might have interpreted the last terrorist and me as being on the same side. With those kinds of assumptions in effect, the terrorist might have even shot at the police, causing a firefight and presenting my escape. I could've been dead, instead of sitting here at this table with a grizzled fisherman.
"I can't be certain about it,” I continued, “but it seems to me like the whole thing was a setup. Our goal was to assassinate the leader of a dangerous terrorist organization, and instead, we found ourselves in a hostage scenario, fighting untrained gunmen."