Tanto got on the radio and asked the Team Leader, “What’s the status on that Spectre gunship? We really could use that now.” He also asked about an unmanned drone, not knowing that one had already begun transmitting images from somewhere overhead. The T.L. told Tanto that he’d try to find out.
When they first took to the roofs, Tanto asked whether someone inside Building C would bring them food, drinks, and chairs while they waited. The female case officer who’d gone to dinner with Oz hustled over with Gatorade, water, and candy bars. She tripped as she stepped over the parapet and landed hard, face-first on the roof. Tanto thought she must have hurt herself badly, but she popped to her feet, said she was fine, and continued making deliveries. A male support officer followed with white plastic lawn chairs.
Soon after, with no sign of movement from beyond the walls, Tanto decided he could use a grenade launcher to bolster their defenses. He climbed down and searched the vehicles, with no luck. When he asked over the radio if anyone knew where he might locate one, no one replied. Tanto went to Building C to ask around, but again he struck out. As staffers shredded documents, destroyed sensitive materials, and performed other prescribed tasks to prepare to abandon the Annex, Tanto stuffed extra mags of ammo in his pocket and headed for the door.
On his way out, Tanto came across base chief Bob sitting on the floor in a main hallway, his back against the wall, his head in his hands. Tanto thought Bob looked as though he’d given up. Even if Bob was talking on the phone, Tanto thought, his body language sent a message of defeat. Tanto shook his head with disdain but kept quiet. A withering monologue spooled in his mind: As a leader you sure as hell do not show that. Don’t show that to the fricking people that you’re in charge of. Maybe you’re sitting there talking on the phone, but it doesn’t look it. Find a way to look positive and look proactive. Find a way that everybody’s morale stays up. He suppressed a desire to punch the base chief in the face.
Standing over Bob, Tanto remembered the BlackBerry the militiaman gave him outside the villa. None of the DS agents had reported losing one, so Tanto thought that it might belong to Chris Stevens.
“Hey sir,” Tanto said, holding it out to Bob. “Here’s a phone we found over at the consulate. You might want to check it out.” The base chief silently took the BlackBerry, and Tanto returned to Building B. Tanto never learned its owner.
Atop the roofs, the men talked, snacked on candy, and replenished their fluids. Most suffered from varying degrees of smoke inhalation. Tig felt as though he might cough up a lung. A few went inside buildings for quick bathroom breaks. They checked their gunsights and weapons. They determined their fields of fire, so each man knew which area to be watching for attackers.
As they waited, the Team Leader came on the radio to let the operators know that the surveillance drone was overhead. He had no word on a gunship. The T.L. asked the men on each building and tower to remove a strobe light from the ammunition cans, to help the drone identify their locations.
Tanto hoped that the strobes also would guide a gunship, so he flipped one on and placed it in the middle of the roof. But soon after, he abandoned his hope for armed air support. “I don’t think we’re getting a gunship,” Tanto told D.B.
D.B. had reached the same conclusion. He let out a rueful laugh.
“Fuck it,” Tanto said. “What are we going to do about it? We’ll just do what we can.”
Across the driveway, atop Building D, Jack heard the Team Leader’s request differently. Jack understood the T.L. to mean that he wanted the operators to put infrared strobe lights on their helmets. Jack knew that the drone was unarmed, and he held out no hope for a gunship. Wearing a strobe wouldn’t do him any good personally. Worse, if one of the attackers had somehow obtained a pair of night-vision goggles, the light would act like a bull’s-eye on Jack’s head. He ignored the order.
Being on the roof gave Jack time to look himself over. He noticed that his jeans were soaking wet. At first Jack thought he must have fallen in water without realizing it, but then he grasped that his jeans were drenched with sweat. While looking at his pants, Jack saw a large rip on the left leg. A pocket-size flap just below his crotch hung open to the light Mediterranean breeze. He had no idea how it happened. He was just glad the tear wasn’t a couple of inches higher. When the first muster call came, he’d pulled on his jeans without wasting time for underwear.
As the exterior lights continued to illuminate the area outside the Annex, a man who lived in a compound on the south side of Annex Road came to the wall opposite the tower where Tig stood. He demanded in Arabic that the exterior lights be turned off. Tig found one of the local guards who spoke English and asked him to translate. The guard told Tig that the neighbor said they should “turn off these lights, because they’re going to know where you are.”
The comment disturbed Tig. What does he mean ‘they’? Tig wondered. How does he even know what’s going on here? He told the guard to tell the neighbor to ignore the lights and go back inside his house. The man huffed away. A few minutes later, a Toyota pickup truck and four cars sped out of the man’s property, one after another. Tig walked to Building C to tell the Team Leader, but neither knew what it might portend, if anything. While talking with the T.L., Tig left his helmet and broken night-vision goggles on the Building C patio.
After caring for Scott Wickland in Building C, Rone made radio calls asking if anyone else was hurt and needed his help. He had no immediate takers, but he told Dave Ubben that he wanted another look at Ubben’s injured arm. An Annex staffer noticed Rone prowling through the building, eager to climb to his rooftop fighting post.
Rone looked completely at home and in his element, the staffer told Jack later. He moved with confidence and wore a predator’s grin. Rone’s self-assurance buoyed the non-shooting staffers in Building C, who had finally acknowledged that their lives depended on the operators. The staffer told Jack: “He was like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to unleash hate on these guys.’ He was ready to go to war, and he didn’t care how many of them were coming.”
As he watched Rone jock up, the staffer couldn’t get over how much the muscular former SEAL with the sculpted beard resembled King Leonidas from the movie 300. Jack understood completely.
While making his rounds, Oz climbed atop Building D and spent a few minutes talking with Jack, to learn as much as he could about what had happened at the Compound. Oz told Jack he felt frustrated that he wasn’t among them and asked if they’d killed many attackers. Jack told him he didn’t know. Oz made sure they had enough supplies and ammo, then climbed down.
While marking time on the roof, Jack and the DS agent from Tripoli talked about how unprepared the Compound had been for the assault. The agent told Jack that if the attackers hadn’t begun chanting as they swarmed through the pedestrian gate, the outcome might have been worse, because the agents at the villa would have been caught even more by surprise.
The agent’s comment made Jack think about the difference between what happened at the Compound and what they were prepared to withstand at the Annex. When the Compound came under fire, three DS agents were relaxing outside the villa, one was inside watching a movie, and the fifth was doing paperwork in the TOC. One of the four 17 February militiamen who’d been hired for Compound security was absent, and the Blue Mountain guards were unarmed. By contrast, the Annex’s active defense team featured six heavily armed, highly skilled operators stationed on fortified rooftops and tower fighting positions, girding for battle. Supporting them were three DS agents, two experienced Annex staffers, and if they remained at their posts, three armed Libyan guards the operators hoped were ready to fight.
Another major difference was that the men at the Annex knew the enemy was coming. Any attackers who tried to get inside the walls would be met by a ferocious response. The Compound was a relatively soft target; the operators felt certain that the Annex wouldn’t be.
When Oz climbed down after his talk with Jack, he stationed himself atop the towe
r platform near the northeast corner of the wall. That tower, known as Fighting Position Three, allowed Oz to overlook Zombieland and two large, open pens packed with several hundred filthy sheep. Now and then, two men Oz presumed to be shepherds walked around the area. Oz watched them closely but they didn’t seem to be armed. He studied the sheep, too, concerned that attackers might try to use the animals as concealment and crawl among them toward the wall.
Sometime before 12:30 a.m., Tanto and D.B. saw a car arrive at a dimly lit parking area on Annex Road, about three hundred yards east of their position. The operators often used the lot as a drop-off point for vehicles they needed to have serviced, leaving them there for a British-owned company to collect by tow truck. Near the parking area was a house owned by a family that didn’t welcome the Americans’ presence on their street. The teenage boys who lived there walked around the neighborhood with their friends trying to look tough, like a street gang armed with sticks and knives. Sometimes they fired bottle rockets and threw M-80 fireworks from Zombieland over the east Annex wall.
Another car pulled into the parking area, then two more. At least two other cars arrived in the minutes that followed. Tanto and D.B. looked at each other, then slid their night-vision goggles down from their helmets. They focused hard on the parking area. Two Benghazi police cars stopped at the lot, but soon drove off. Tanto narrated the events on the radio, punctuating the sequence of comings and goings with a complaint: “Hey, the cops are leaving!” The other cars remained.
“Are we expecting any friendlies to come and set up a perimeter around us?” Tanto called to the Team Leader. “ ’Cause, you know, there’s some cars starting to mass in that parking lot where we drop our cars off.”
“Let me check,” the T.L. answered. “I’m not aware of any.”
With each new car in the lot, Tanto and D.B. grew more anxious.
“Man, I don’t think we’re expecting anybody,” Tanto said. They tried to determine whether the men looked like 17 February militia members, but they had no way to know.
D.B. told Tanto that he saw men moving away from the cars, in the general direction of the Annex.
“Are they the locals that live there, or are they bad guys?” Tanto asked.
“I can’t tell,” D.B. said. “It looks like they’re moving. But they’re not moving normally. They’re moving tactically.” After a pause, D.B. added: “I think these guys are starting to move on us.”
His adrenaline flowing, Tanto called out over the radio: “Be advised, we’ve got unknowns moving toward our compound from the drop-off parking lot.”
Tanto looked out over an area of trees and brush and saw one man advancing. He continued peering into the dark and saw another. Soon Tanto counted a half dozen men approaching. Tanto wondered how many more of them he couldn’t see in the dark. The men had nowhere to take cover, but Tanto and D.B. watched as they tried to conceal themselves by moving steadily from bush to bush, from one spindly tree to the next. Tanto thought the approaching men’s movements resembled kids playing hide-and-seek. The operators’ pulse rates rose.
Tanto repeated his radio call to the Team Leader. “Are we expecting any friendlies at all? We got guys moving on us now. If we have friendlies, I need to know.”
“Tanto,” the T.L. said, “I have got no word, no confirmation that there are any friendlies.”
“Well, then are we cleared hot to shoot, if we need to shoot?”
“You make the call,” the Team Leader said. “But right now we have no friendlies.”
“Roger that,” Tanto said.
The approaching men increased in number. Some wore white T-shirts. Illuminated by the exterior Annex lights and the moonlight from above, they glowed a fluorescent green in the operators’ night-vision goggles. When the men among the trees came within a hundred yards of the Annex’s east wall, Tanto counted nine of them. Still he wondered if others, perhaps wearing black shirts or hidden in the grove, remained invisible to him. He focused his mind on the fields of fire that he, D.B., and the DS agent on Building B had established, to ensure that they had cross-covered the area beyond the walls, so their gunfire would spread across interlocking sectors.
Tanto squeezed his left hand around an area near the barrel of his assault rifle that the operators called the “broom handle,” to illuminate his laser sight for three-second intervals. He switched the beam to a setting that was invisible to the naked eye, but appeared as a bright dot on any object it hit when seen through night-vision goggles.
Tanto moved the beam from one approaching figure to the next, allowing a pause between sightings in case any of the men outside the walls had night-vision goggles, too. If so, they could use the goggles to reverse-target the laser-firing Americans on the rooftops. Each time he hit one with the beam, he’d ask D.B., “Is that the guy you’re seeing?” When D.B. confirmed it, Tanto moved to another. That way, they knew that both had identified the same potential enemies. When the targeting began, the DS agent didn’t have night-vision goggles, so he could only strain his eyes and hope to spot the oncoming men on his own.
As Tanto pointed out each possible target, he called on the radio to Oz, whose vantage point on the northeast corner tower gave him a similar view of the approaching men. Oz saw them coming, too, replying “Roger” each time he saw Tanto’s laser hit one. Although the technology gave them an advantage, the operators knew that the area beyond the wall was rife with dead spots, dark areas where their goggles couldn’t help them see.
As they prepared to engage, the operators kept thinking about the teenagers who lived in the nearby house. The Americans resolved that they wouldn’t shoot until fired upon, or until some other action demonstrated that the figures outside the Annex were enemies, and not quasi-friendly militiamen or tough local teens armed with nothing more powerful than firecrackers.
Tanto kept watching men trying to conceal themselves in his assigned sector, but he didn’t see weapons. Then D.B. spotted an armed man in his sector. He called out: “I got AKs.” Tanto looked again and saw rifles, too.
From their stealthy movements to the weapons they carried, by all indications the men were enemy attackers approaching the Annex from the area east of the wall. But the Americans wanted even more confirmation before engaging. The possibility remained, no matter how small, that the men were 17 February militiamen coming to help. All Tanto could say on the radio was: “Guys, be advised. I believe we’ve got bad guys coming up on us. Stand by.”
Then Tanto saw a man drop to one knee.
Before Tanto and D.B. noticed the arriving cars and the approaching men, Tanto had called to ask if anyone had a spare pair of night-vision goggles for the DS agent on Building B. A case officer at Building C produced a pair and gave them to Tig, to bring to Building B on his rounds. On his way to deliver the goggles, Tig stopped at Building A to grab two cases of water from a front hallway.
He climbed the ladder on the side of Building B and dropped off the goggles. By then, Tanto, D.B., and the DS agent were already occupied watching the men nearing the Annex wall.
His rifle hanging loose on its straps in front of him, Tig walked to the east side of Building C, toward the area the operators called their prison gym. He could see Oz in position at the northeast tower, some thirty yards ahead, so he lugged the water bottles that way. As Tig approached the workout area, something flew over the wall in his direction.
He couldn’t see what it was, but sparks sputtered from one end. It had a lit fuse.
TEN
Hard Target
TIG WAS MID-STRIDE, APPROACHING THE OPERATORS’ prison gym, when the bomb landed at the far edge of the workout area. He had protection from his heavy Rhodesian vest and his body armor, but Tig’s head was bare. He’d accidentally left his helmet around the corner at Building C while talking with the Team Leader about the nosy neighbor. Tig froze, dropped the water he’d brought for Oz, and braced for impact.
His mind focused on a single thought: This is gonna hurt.
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br /> But when the white light flashed and the boom sounded, the twenty-five feet that separated Tig from the explosion was just enough to save him. He took stock and, to his surprise, found himself intact and without a scratch.
Tig couldn’t be certain, but based on the sight and sound of the blast, and the absence of shrapnel, he believed that the improvised explosive device lobbed over the wall was a small “jelly” or “gelatina” bomb. An easy-to-produce favorite of radical Libyan militias, gelatina bombs were cheap, moldable explosives made from gelignite, a material similar to dynamite but more stable and abundant. Benghazi fishermen used gelatina bombs to ease their labors, tossing them into the Mediterranean, waiting for the geyser, then collecting the fish that rose to the surface. The attackers seemed to be using the bomb for a similar purpose, to stun or distract the Americans before swooping in for the kill.
The moment the blast went off, the men who’d been sneaking toward the east wall opened fire on the Annex.
Tig sprinted to reach Oz at the northeast tower. He climbed on, stood to Oz’s left, and found his friend already engaging their enemies.
Before the blast, Oz stood on the steel platform looking forward to Tig’s arrival with the water bottles. He heard the whoosh of something flying over the east wall, but wasn’t immediately sure what it was. When the explosion hit and gunfire followed, Oz understood that the bomb was the attackers’ signal to begin their assault, just as the Americans sometimes used stun grenades or “flash bangs” to initiate an action.
From the laser spotting he’d done via radio with Tanto, Oz already had a general idea where some of the attackers were located, spread out in the dark among the trees and brush. He focused on those areas when the shooting began, watching for muzzle flashes and snatches of white shirts in the moonlight. Whenever he spotted one, Oz fired in that direction.
13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi Page 18