When the call came in for shots fired, Stoop Three “stood up,” went on line, and in five minutes they were expected to be in their helo, airborne and covering the approach of the high-speed assault boats. The SEALs called this “going from stupor to trooper.” Their job now was to cover the approach of the high-speed boats—provide sniper cover hanging out the doors of a moving helicopter, at night, shooting with night vision goggles.
After the close, airless greenroom, being out on the flight deck was like having the whole world yawn open. They peered around with their night vision goggles; the green steel of the compartment was now replaced by the vast digital green of night.
Bracken, the designated spotter, carried a match-grade M-14 rifle with both an MO-4 and a laser bolted on. O’Hallaran’s load was no lighter; he carried a full-stocked PS2 with a heavy sound suppressor, the same MO-4 and a day pack containing ten PS2 and M-14 magazines of 7.62 ammo: tracer, armor piercing, armor piercing incendiary, predator, and depleted uranium rounds. The full load.
The yellow shirt led them all the way to the door. As they crawled into the Seahawk, there was the high whine of turbines and the rotors began to swing round. Bracken snapped his climbing harness and carabiner into a deck ring on the port side, O’Hallaran on the starboard side behind the pilot. From the cockpit, a goggled, insectlike head clicked around. O’Hallaran snapped into the internal communications jack and keyed his mike.
“We’re good,” he said.
The pilot gave a thumbs-up, the Seahawk roared, and jet exhaust gusted heat and the smell of kerosene through the open door. The helicopter lifted off.
O’Hallaran saw the Boxer’s superstructure and deck sink down below, then angle away as the helo turned sharply left. The green-black sea flashed under them. O’Hallaran checked his harness, checked his magazine, and switched on the MO-4. The wind through the open door rippled his flight suit and his legs were pushed back as the helicopter gathered speed.
On the tactical net he heard the beep of the code sinks, then the voice of Mike Geiger, the HSAC commander.
“Sea Fox six and eight, inbound on pattern three.”
Pattern three was a racetrack course that would bring the high-speed assault boats in a wide loop a mile astern of the lifeboat. The Sea Foxes were moving, and the whole big contraption was springing to life. O’Hallaran knew where to look, and he knew what to look for, but he could not see the HSACs. Painted in long gray stripes, low and deadly, they were designed not to be seen, their sloped sides and reversed bows made them look like waves, not boats. O’Hallaran pointed his lenses into the dense night behind the carrier and stared. He was supposed to shadow the high-speed boats toward the targets and now he couldn’t even see them. Jesus, he thought, what’s the use of having invisible boats? The sea and sky were merged at the horizon like a smudge. Down there somewhere were twelve SEAL assaulters in two HSACs doing forty knots.
Where?
Finally, a flicker of gray lunged across the Boxer’s broad, pale wake. It was followed by another, the shadow of a shadow, deadly things as narrow as ghosts.
O’Hallaran keyed his microphone: “Stoop Zero three is inbound with Sea Fox package.”
The TOC answered, calm and serene, like they could see everything: “All units, Tango actual, window will open at 1905. Standby to go hot.”
Wilson was opening a window for action. Aboard Bainbridge, Mel’s sniper cell would engage the targets and take out the bad guys. The high-speed assault craft, covered by the helo-borne snipers, would assault the lifeboat, engage any surviving bad guys and liberate the hostage. The outcome depended on a thousand things going right and nothing going wrong.
* * *
In the TOC, Greg Wilson could see everything; everything except what he needed to see most—inside the lifeboat. The Bainbridge’s own flight deck cameras were low-light capable and pointed aft. They covered the boat perfectly, but they could not see through the decks. Bainbridge’s cameras were one of half a dozen video-feed windows on the command display. Launched from the USS Boxer, a ScanEagle drone churned out a circular flight plan covering the entire area. Its low-light cameras pinned the lifeboat from the west, and directly overhead at 20,000 feet, a PC-3 Orion patrol plane did a ten-mile-wide orbit over the ships.
On the command screens, the lifeboat was towing eighty feet behind Bainbridge, their plot symbols touching. To the right, the east, Boxer ghosted along on a parallel course, three miles to starboard. The Sea Fox package, two stealth boats with the wave-skimming Seahawk close behind, were making a broad, clockwise turn to come in perpendicular to the lifeboat. The job of the Sea Foxes was to intercept the lifeboat without crossing behind it and fouling Mel’s fields of fire.
Mel’s shots would have to be magic, and the Sea Fox package would have to work some sorcery of their own. They had to make their approach unseen, timing it based on a guess. They couldn’t get closer than a quarter of a mile until Mel’s guys shot. And once the snipers went hot, the assault teams of Sea Fox had to instantly assault and board the lifeboat to prevent any surviving pirates from shooting Phillips in cold blood.
Wilson watched a trio of blips heading obliquely away from the Boxer; the helicopter and the HSACs. Invisible even to Bainbridge’s radar, the assault boats’ position was revealed only because they transmitted an identification code on the Naval Tactical Data System. The only platform that could actually detect the boats was the submarine, which could track the high-speed scream of their titanium propellers. The blips came on, the helicopter trailing.
At one of the stations in the TOC, Greg Wilson rolled a trackball across the data display, triggering a time/speed/distance logarithm. At forty knots, forty-six miles an hour, on pattern three, it was three minutes and fifty seconds until the HSACs intersected the target. Moore saw the trackball wipe over the screen, and he heard the voice of the operations officer.
“Three minutes out.”
“Notify Bainbridge.”
One of the Twidgets contacted Bainbridge’s combat Information center, “Be advised, Sea Fox package is three minutes out.”
It was Frank Costello’s voice that answered back from the destroyer’s bridge, “Bainbridge copies.”
There were maybe thirty seconds of tense silence.
The blips representing the boats were two circles, the symbol for the trailing helicopter was a half rectangle overlaid with a “T.” The symbols blinked slowly, overlapping as they moved forward. Now they were two and half miles from the boat.
In the TACTAS room, Mel and his shooters were ready. In the TOC, Wilson stared at the command screens, making sure he saw everything correctly. The boats and helicopters were converging.
In an opaque night, three bad guys and a hostage heaved up and down in a closed lifeboat. Would they hear the helicopter? Would they see the HSACs coming?
“Alert Stoop Zero Seven, window is open,” Wilson said. “Sea Fox package continue to phase line Alpha.”
The orders were passed.
Wilson had authorized Mel to fire when he had the shot. All three at once, or nothing at all.
Now it was a roll of the dice.
* * *
In the TACTAS compartment, the earphones all hissed together. On the shooting platform, Mel put his legs apart, lifting them up and over the calves of the shooters to his right and left. The four men sprawled together, looking out of the two ports, their legs locked like teenagers watching a horror movie on TV.
Mel acknowledged the open window on the tactical net, and then said quietly to the men next to him, “Hold and track, I will initiate.”
“Check.”
“Check.”
“Check.”
Mel then keyed the sniper’s net. “Stoop Zero Three, track and hold. You are red-light.”
O’Hallaran’s voice came over the radio, buffeted by the wind through the open helicopter door. “Stop Zero Three, track and hold. We are red-light.”
Mel stared at the boat through his MO-4. He wasn’
t going to shoot, he was going to call the shots. Green on green—he could see a pair of heads in the pilothouse. T-shirt and collared shirt. Mel pressed his shins down on the calves to his right and left.
“Who has?” Mel intoned.
“Bravo has,” Buckwalter said.
“Charlie has,” whispered MacQuarrie.
There was a pause, a deliberate, purposed interval of silence and Bubba Holland said, “No joy.”
It was the ritual language of surveillance and snipers. Their plaint and plainsong, part update, part incantation. Each of the shooters had a target. Each a specific kill. Subjects Bravo and Charlie were in the pilothouse, one on the starboard side, the other on the port. They were Buck’s and Doug’s. No matter where they went on the boat, no matter what hole they popped out of. They were tagged. They were visible head and shoulders through the windshield. They were had.
Bubba strained his eye against the green disk of his sight. There was nothing in the bow hatch. He could not see Delta.
Seconds passed like days.
Mel kept his eye on the spotting scope. The bow hatch was open, but there was no silhouette in it. Delta was not to be seen.
He watched, they all watched. Seconds ticked. The lifeboat heaved up and down as it breasted the swells. Mel knew, they all knew, that the Sea Fox package was coming, and with it, a great clamoring, jet-powered helicopter. The bad guys were jacked up and had been shooting off rounds. They wanted their friend back. If they heard a helicopter, or saw the boats …
Mel pressed his legs apart, renewing contact, touch, with his shooters.
“Who has?”
“Bravo has.”
“Charlie has.”
Then Bubba Holland said firmly, “Delta has.”
Mel saw them all, locked them all in his eyes, and as he opened his mouth the lifeboat lurched over the top of a cross swell and wallowed sharply. The towline jerked taught and above them it gave an audible twang.
The heads in the pilothouse disappeared.
The words strangled off in Mel’s throat.
“No joy!”
“Nada.”
The bow of the lifeboat went deep and then bobbed up nearly vertically. Still square in the hatch, Delta pitched forward, bent at his waist. Holding his rifle in one hand, the other sprawled out, fingers clutching at the bow cleat, Erasto managed barely to keep upright. Now he was visible, objective Delta, but in the pilothouse the other heads vanished.
Half a minute passed, an eternity.
“Who has?”
“______”
“______”
Only Bubba whispered: “Delta has.”
A vile string of blasphemy unspooled in Mel’s head. No one on the planet can string obscenity like a master chief petty officer in the United States Navy. But nothing came out of his mouth, not a sound.
Mel glanced to the left, outside of the light of his scope. He looked east, to the place in which the moon would eventually rise. It was gray-black darkness. Mel saw nothing, but he knew two HSACs were ripping toward them. He knew they were trailed by a Seahawk helicopter flying not higher than six feet off the water. He prayed a sinner’s prayer: Don’t let them be seen, and then, Please God, please, don’t let me fuck this up.
The lifeboat wallowed and then lifted its bow like a horse that had stumbled. Out of the bow hatch Erasto was still fully visible. He turned around, back turned toward the ship, looking back at the pilothouse windows. Behind the lifeboat’s windscreen, one head came up. Then another.
Mel had his scope zoomed on the bow. He could see Delta’s face so clearly he could see that his pupils were dilated. Erasto was staring into the night, gawking after shadows, his eyes cranked open to maximum. Two silhouettes in the pilothouse. Just two.
Then, Mel saw Delta jerk to his right. He saw Erasto lift his hand and point off to the east, point away from the destroyer’s starboard quarter. Mel tried to force away the thought that they had seen the HSACs, or that they had heard or seen the helicopter.
There was no time anymore, no seconds or minutes, everything was slow, moving as it does when the slack is taken out of a trigger, when the weapon is against your shoulder and you’ve done everything to stalk and aim and it comes down to an even, straight pull.
Delta was lifting his AK-47. He had a hand on the pistol grip and his fingers were closing over the forestock. Delta was aiming at something off the right side of the lifeboat. Behind the windshield the two shadows moved together, both of them now on the starboard side, one slightly in front of the other.
Mel kept his voice dead flat and even; his breath automatically controlled. Delta was aiming his rifle, but it did not matter, Mel and his boys were at cool zero.
“Who has?”
“Bravo has.”
“Charlie has.”
“Delta has.”
They were flush. Mel keyed the microphone and said over the tactical net: “Fire.”
Three bullets. Three kills. It was over. The pirates who had taken Maersk Alabama were dead, and Captain Richard Phillips was free.
BIN LADEN’S ROAD TO ABBOTTABAD
THE DAY THE WORLD CHANGED
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
AT 8:46 A.M., ON THE MORNING OF September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 tore through the ninety-third floor of the World Trade Center’s building number one. There was not a cloud in the sky, and not one person in America’s counterterrorism apparatus, no one from the FBI director to the newest field agent, no one from the CIA director to the first tour case officer, analyst, or technician, no one thought it could be an accident.
From the first terrible instant of the 9/11 attacks American intelligence agencies knew that they had been had.
In the weeks and months prior to 9/11, the FBI and CIA had received and processed dozens of explicit warnings—these included both raw reports from officers and assets in the field, as well as polished memoranda and white papers from foreign intelligence services. Some warned of a general attack, others stated specifically that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda intended to crash hijacked airliners into American targets.
But all these reports, both foreign and domestic, were ignored.
The information had filtered up through the ossified bureaucracies of two equally dysfunctional organizations. This intelligence crossed the same gray, government-issued desks at both the CIA and FBI. At both places, officers and analysts had their workspaces arranged into cubicle plantations where one anonymous, vindictive, or lazy person could derail an investigation, kill a lead, or spike a report. At the CIA, especially, such lethal office politics had been raised to an art form. And things were nearly as bad at the FBI, where a newly appointed director had surrounded himself with careerist survivors marking time until retirement.
No one who lived through 9/11 will ever forget where they were, what they were doing, or what they felt when they heard the news. The entire country ground to a halt under a staggering series of blows. It was an epoch-changing moment—one of the darkest in American history. The bloody hijackings, the crashes, the fires, the senseless deaths, the constant dread that even worse was to come, made the events all seem like a blur. Even now, America struggles with a sort of posttraumatic shock about 9/11.
There was chaos on the streets of Manhattan, and fear in the power corridors of Washington, D.C.
But America’s day of heroism and sorrow was only beginning.
At 9:37 a.m., a third set of hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing all aboard and 137 people on the ground, most of them civilians.
Five minutes before 10:00 a.m., passengers aboard the fourth hijacked airliner, United Airlines Flight 93, rose against the men who intended to murder them. After a protracted and bloody struggle, passengers used a drink cart to batter their way into the cockpit. As these brave men and women fought terrorists for control of the aircraft, the 767 rolled onto its back, went into a dive, and crashed into a field outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
; The fifty-one passengers and crew aboard Flight 93 had proven that they, like New York’s brave firemen and police officers, were willing to sacrifice themselves for people that they had never met. The selfless bravery of these average Americans saved the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of additional victims. It is believed that Flight 93’s intended target was the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
In Florida, President Bush returned by motorcade to Air Force One, then parked on a secured taxiway at the Sarasota airport. Using wartime emergency departure protocols, Air Force One rocketed quickly to 45,000 feet and began a meandering cross-country trip that would take the commander in chief across fourteen states and parts of the Gulf of Mexico, only returning to Washington eight hours after every other aircraft flying over the United States had been forced to land.
September 11 was the most catastrophic intelligence failure in America’s history. For both the CIA and FBI, a series of small, almost inconsequential mistakes in analysis, investigation, and intelligence collection melded together. The systems were broken. But the major malfunctions were at the top.
* * *
On the morning of September 11, 2001, CIA director George Tenet stood at the windows of his seventh-floor office and watched the cloud of smoke rising from the wreckage of the Pentagon, a mere ten miles away. Tenet had come to the directorship of the CIA after the abrupt resignation of John Deutch in December 1996. Tenet, a political appointee, had zero field experience; he had drifted into intelligence by working as a senator’s assistant. After serving on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Transition Team, Tenet found himself appointed first to the National Security Council, and then, after two years as deputy director of the CIA, he became DCI, director of Central Intelligence. His career at the CIA was marked by miscalculations, mistakes, and staggering screwups.
SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden Page 8