by John Weisman
Charlie had been given a deadline of April 28 to complete placing the beacons. Then he was to stand by to go active on the twenty-ninth. He was hardly able to contain himself. He’d be a part of it—whatever it was.
He’d surveyed the locations over the past three days, but there had been too much moonlight. Tonight was overcast, with rain supposedly coming early in the morning. Then clear all day on both the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth. Perfect operational weather.
He’d done all the prep work. Batteries had been installed and the beacons themselves attached to their spiked bases. He didn’t have to turn them on. The helo pilots would do that as they approached because the beacons would respond to PAIT signals. They’d been preset to a specific frequency—217.32, for example. All the pilots had to do was dial that frequency, transmit, and the fireflies would go active. They’d be visible for about three-quarters of a mile through the pilots’ night-vision goggles. On final extraction, the pilots would turn the beacons off, and, hopefully, the next time the fields were plowed, they’d be plowed under.
What made the op so easy for Charlie was the fact that the furrows in both fields ran perpendicular to the target, ensuring that all his lines would be straight. His only obstacle: not leaving a trail.
He solved that problem by cutting two pieces of three-foot-long by foot-and-a-quarter-wide board from the scrap at Mohammed’s carpentry shop. He had set the first down, crabbed onto it, set the second in front, crabbed a second yard, and kept repeating the process. The three-foot length—ninety-two centimeters was how Charlie had measured it at the shop—ensured that the beacons would be set uniformly. The boards themselves kept him from disturbing the furrows too much.
Charlie laid the first three Phoenix Beacons adjacent to the low wall of the rectangular compound that sat across the road from GZ. He stuck them in the ground at fifteen-foot intervals, then made his way back to the road, dragged himself and his boards five yards east, lined up with the first flasher, then repeated the process with two beacons. The result? After twenty-eight minutes he’d laid out a perfect box-and-one. Then it was time to run the second set.
0445 Hours
Exhausted, Charlie made his way through the tree line adjacent to the ten-foot wall on GZ’s southwest side so he could stow his boards on the furniture dolly and wheel himself home. It had begun to rain, and he was soaked clear through to the skin. He was cold. And sore. Sore? He hurt like hell. But hurt was part of Charlie’s life. He’d accepted it when he was wounded in Mogadishu. He’d accepted it when he lost his legs to an al-Qaeda in Iraq suicide bomber in a tunnel outside Mahmudiya in 2004. Shit, hurt was part of his job description. And, just like every other Tier One operator, he never allowed it to affect his performance. The mission was everything. It was at the core of the Ranger Creed.
So, yes, he hurt. But he was also energized. Energized the way Rangers are energized when they complete their mission. Rangers like Charlie know there are only two ways to go home: complete the mission and smoke a great cigar and maybe enjoy some single malt, or be shipped home in a body bag.
He would burst Valhalla the good news when he got back to the shed in Hassan Town: Mission accomplished. Standing by to stand by.
Standing by to go home.
40
The White House Situation Room, Washington, D.C.
April 28, 2011, 1052 Hours Local Time
“Mr. President, the optimum time for Operation Neptune Spear is the next twenty-four hours. The assault package is in position in Jalalabad. The weather is cooperating. The moon is almost new, so there is little ambient light. The targets are all in one place, and we can fly protective cover without the Pakistanis knowing anything.” The CIA analyst known as Spike paused to look at POTUS’s face.
He didn’t like what he saw. The president’s nonverbal reaction was impassive at best. Certainly not positive.
“Even though there has been no ‘eyes-on’ identification, every bit of empirical evidence points to UBL being there.” The analyst looked directly at the president. “And that is something we can’t guarantee much longer.”
Vince Mercaldi decided it was time to put the situation in even starker terms. “Mr. President, the window of opportunity is closing. It is closing fast.”
The CIA director would have liked Wesley Bolin to be with him this morning. But the admiral was gone. He’d left at zero-dark-hundred for the long flight to Jalalabad. The strike was planned for 0100 local time on April 29. The moon phase was perfect, the weather also: clouds, preceding a cold front with rain. The perfect environment for a successful stealth mission deep into Pakistan.
The president frowned at his CIA director and Spike. The public schedule released by the White House told the world that at 1050 Hours the president would be receiving a national security briefing on the Libya crisis in the Situation Room.
And frankly, the president wished he was receiving just that.
Libya was a positive. Both his national security chief and his counterterrorism advisor had assured him that Libya was a win-win for the U.S. and for the administration.
Yes, sure, said Don Sorken, they’d made mistakes with regard to Tunisia, Bahrain, and Egypt. Yes, they’d missed a few signals in Yemen and hadn’t quite read the politics on the ground in Tripoli correctly. But, the NSC director insisted, he and Dwayne Daley were convinced the Libya crisis gave the administration the chance to show the world how well the United States understood the Arab Spring. The U.S. had successfully led the opening days of the bombing campaign against Qaddafi’s air defenses; tomorrow, April 29, representatives of forty countries were meeting in London to coordinate anti-Qaddafi efforts. It would, Daley said, all be over in a matter of weeks and NATO’s going to get all the credit. Even though the U.S. had supplied drones and satellite intelligence. It was time, he said, to get out front.
Oh, sure, CIA’s defeatist analysts insisted on saying the Libyan situation could deteriorate; that Qaddafi was well entrenched and financed; that the situation could drag on for months with no clear winner; and that in any case, there was no clear picture of who the rebels were, what they’d do when and if they prevailed, and what their relationship with the U.S. would be. Worse, CIA recommended a clandestine approach: stealth support of supplies, intelligence, and quiet military assistance for the Libyan insurgents channeled through NATO.
“But on the other hand—and it is a big ‘but,’ Mr. President,” Dwayne had growled to the president not an hour ago, “what has CIA done for you lately? Forty-three thousand people at Langley, a budget in the tens of billions, and they can’t even prove Usama Bin Laden’s living in Abbottabad. And now Vince Mercaldi, your handpicked CIA director, is trying to force your hand into approving an operation in Abbottabad. With no proof.”
Abbottabad, Abbottabad, Abbottabad.
The president was sick and tired of Abbottabad.
And yet all Vince wanted to talk about was Abbottabad and Bin Laden. A risky mission. A possible embarrassment for the administration. There was no up-side unless Bin Laden was there, and he was killed.
Seventy-six, seventy-seven percent chance he’d be there. That’s the figure Spike had quoted. There were no guarantees about that, either. It could be fifty percent. It could be zero. That was the point. They didn’t know.
And the president was a man who liked guarantees. Sure things. Sure things were his modus vivendi. It was how he’d campaigned; it was how his whole political career had been engineered. Create the proper conditions, build an organization, develop wide grassroots support, and do it all under everyone else’s radar. Make sure you had it in the bag, then make it all look like a surprise. And if those prerequisites weren’t met, then kick the can down the road until they were.
Except this was one instance when the president couldn’t kick the can down the road. They would need a decision. Go or no-go.
Vince wanted a decision today. The president could see it in the CIA director’s face. And Spike’s.
It w
as Spike who’d told him point-blank that he would be morally, politically, and strategically culpable if he didn’t do this. Not going to Abbottabad would come back to haunt him, the analyst had said.
Those were challenging words addressed to the Leader of the Free World. Words to box him in. Paint him into a corner.
Because they were, the president understood, absolutely true.
Which is why they were the precise questions the polls he’d secretly ordered the day after that Sit Room session were supposed to answer. The polls—two of them, both close-hold—that he’d had his top political consultant conduct.
First: Would he be held accountable if it was discovered he hadn’t gone after UBL when he had the chance?
Second: If a risky military operation became a disaster, would he be held responsible?
And third: If the answers to those questions were yes, how deeply would they affect his chances of reelection?
The president had to know the answers before he could act. It was Litigation 101: never ask a question to which you do not already know the answer. Otherwise he was just rolling dice.
Not his style.
He’d said just over a week ago that he would give them an answer today. And he’d meant it.
But the polls weren’t completed yet. There’d been screw-ups. That unfortunate info-bit had been whispered in his ear by the White House political director as they made their way down here from the Oval Office.
Results wouldn’t be in until early Friday. Tomorrow morning.
Today he had nothing to give them.
The president stroked his chin. “Spike, you make an overwhelmingly convincing argument.” And the analyst had, too. The only possible answer to Spike’s presentation was “Go,” and the president knew it. So did everyone else in the room.
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
“And so . . .” The president paused.
He could see them anticipating.
But he was the president. The CINC—commander in chief. They couldn’t do a thing without him. That was the law.
There was no reason to hem or to haw. “You’ll have my final decision tomorrow.” The president hoisted himself out of his chair and left without another word.
Vince Mercaldi sat stunned. Tomorrow?
Tomorrow was a travel day. The president was scheduled to leave the White House at 8:30 for Tuscaloosa, Alabama, then fly to Cape Canaveral for the launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour, followed by an event in Miami. POTUS wouldn’t return to the White House until shortly before midnight.
The CIA director had no idea what was going on. And he didn’t like it one bit.
But there was nothing he could do to fix the situation. Or force it.
He hadn’t boxed the president into a corner.
Not at all.
It had been the other way around.
41
Joint Operation Center, Jalalabad, Afghanistan
April 28, 2011, 2030 Hours Local Time
“Stand ’em down, Mac.” Wesley Bolin wiped his face with his hands. “We got a hurry-up-and-wait from POTUS. Won’t hear anything until tomorrow.” He muttered something inaudible under his breath.
“Sir?”
“I was just thinking. Get hold of the Sentinel crews and ground the drones we put over the flight path. Let’s keep the two over Abbottabad in a loiter. How much more flight time do they have?”
McGill checked his BlackBerry. “Eighteen hours.
“Relieve them tomorrow afternoon with fresh ones. Hopefully we can go tomorrow night.”
“We got a front coming in about three tomorrow afternoon,” Brigadier General Eric McGill frowned. “Probably have a weather hold even if we do get the go.”
“Crap.”
“What do we tell the troops?” The assault package personnel were well into their alert sequence. They’d been awakened at 5 PM. By six they were working out and having breakfast. Currently they were in the SCIF, the bug-proof room where they’d assembled for their Battle Update Brief, where they were being told that the night’s target was an HVT named Hamid Gul Muhammed, a Taliban bomb maker responsible for the deaths of more than twenty American Soldiers and Marines. They would learn that Gul had fled deep into Pakistan and that the raid was therefore under CIA control.
It was nothing they hadn’t heard before. All of JSOC’s cross-border raids came under CIA control, because so far as the JAG lawyers were concerned, while it was illegal under international law for the U.S. military to invade a sovereign nation, clandestine cross-border incursions were dead-center in the CIA’s mission statement.
“Tell ’em weather. Tell ’em target’s moved. I don’t fricking care.” Wes Bolin was pissed. He almost would have preferred to have the president scrub the mission than drop it into a vacuum.
Worse, when the admiral had asked Vince what happened, the CIA director responded with a stony silence. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—supply a reason for POTUS’s indecision.
It didn’t really matter. The CINC was the CINC. Full stop, end of story.
The Joint Special Operations Command was a strange animal. It didn’t report to the Pentagon hierarchy or to one of the combatant commands, even though most people thought it reported to USSOCOM, the U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. No, JSOC came under the National Command Authority, which translated to the president and the secretary of defense. Without a go from the NCA, nothing moved.
Still, this delay wouldn’t do the shooters any good. Tier One units are like Thoroughbreds. You don’t keep Secretariat in the starting gate overnight.
Secretariats—military ones like Red Squadron, anyway—operate differently, train differently, work differently than conventional units. They shoot tens of thousands of rounds a year honing their skills. They can operate singly or in pairs, squads, teams, platoons, or troops, depending on the situation. Even the way they shoot is different. DEVGRU SEALs and Delta shooters may carry automatic weapons, but on direct-action missions they almost never fire in any mode but semiautomatic. All those bursts of automatic fire by Delta and SEALs happen mainly in movies. DEVGRU SEALs and Delta Soldiers don’t need full auto mode on ninety percent of their operations because they can fire a double or triple tap at virtually the same speed as an automatic weapon does.
And it wasn’t just the human factor that worried Wes Bolin. Tonight all his operational ducks were in the proverbial row. Troops were fresh and primed; weather was perfect; targets were exactly where they were supposed to be. Tomorrow the conditions could change. It could thunderstorm for the next week. Crankshaft—the code name for Bin Laden—could switch locations. Any number of variables could result in additional layers of Murphy factors, which, taken all together, could screw things up. Not make the hit impossible, but make it a lot more difficult. “Better get on it, Mac.”
“Roger, sir.” The big Ranger general stowed his unlit cigar. “By the way,” he said, “the CIA guy—their liaison?”
“Fedorko.”
“Yeah, Fedorko. He’s got a set of prosthetics with him?”
“Affirmative. They’re for Archangel—he’s the undercover CIA’s had in Pakistan since late November.”
“Archangel?” McGill scratched his head.
“That’s his call sign. He’s a double amputee, and we’ll bring him out. But during the mission we need him ambulatory because he’s fluent in Pashto.”
“Know his name?”
“I can find out. Why?”
“ ’Cause I had a master sergeant working for me at the 175 when I was an O-5 whose radio call sign was Archangel. Charlie Becker. Big guy. You didn’t want to fool with him. Hell of a Soldier. Silver Star recipient. Two combat jumps. Yup. Hell of a Soldier. He retired in oh-one or oh-two. Somewhere I seem to remember somebody telling me he’d gone to Langley.”
“Could be. I’ll check,” Bolin said. “Meanwhile, you stand ’em all down, Mac. We’re in hurry-up-and-wait mode until we hear from the CINC.”
/> “Aye-aye, sir.”
42
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
April 29, 2011, 0851 Hours Local Time
“Mr. Director, I’ve got the President for you on the secure line.”
Vince Mercaldi blinked twice. “Got it, thank you.” He picked up the phone and watched the green light illuminate. “Mr. President?”
“Good morning, Mr. Director. This is a conference call. Admiral Bolin is on the line as well.”
“Yes, sir. Morning, Admiral.”
Wes Bolin’s voice boomed in Vince’s ear. “Good morning from J-Bad, Mr. Director.”
Vince shuffled the papers on his desk, found the sheet he needed, and ran his index finger down until he found the item he wanted. “Just taking off for Tuscaloosa, I see, Mr. President?”
“Just about to. Then we head on to the Endeavour launch—the girls are really looking forward to that. I hate to disappoint them, but I think it’ll be scrubbed. Weather’s being uncooperative over there.”
“Well, I hope things turn out otherwise, sir. Those shuttle launches are truly impressive.” The president’s mood certainly has improved, Vince thought.
There was a four- or five-second gap when no one spoke.
Then the president said, “I’m calling to officially inform you and Admiral Bolin that Operation Neptune Spear is a go. I’ve signed the Finding.”
Vince got “Thank you, Mr. President” out a millisecond before Bolin. It must have sounded like an echo chamber on the president’s end.