Damn Few

by Rorke Denver

  “You’re both strong in the water,” the chief said just before we stepped in. “You’re aggressive guys. So get out there and be aggressive. You have to execute.”

  With that, Toro and I pulled our masks up to our faces and began the long, quiet swim across the bay. We used a classic combat-swimmer recovery stroke, a low-in-water sidestroke we had learned our first week in training and had practiced almost every day since. It allowed us to cover great distances efficiently and without stirring up the water too much.

  We knew there was a concrete pier jutting out from the harbor, just shy of one mile away. That’s where the target vessel was waiting, though we couldn’t even see its outline yet.

  “No margin for error on this one,” I whispered to Toro a few yards out from the shore.

  “Could be our first—and last—op ever,” he agreed. “Shortest two careers in SEAL history.”

  There’s a reason sitting ducks are called sitting ducks. Swimming in hostile water is one of the most vulnerable places a warrior can ever find himself. The moment you are discovered, the balance of power shifts horribly against you. The bad guys are above you. You’re below. They have cover. You don’t. You can be shot with no fair chance of returning fire. If you manage to dive underwater, antipersonnel grenades can easily find you there. By far the best defense for a combat swimmer is not being detected at all. Being noticed is often just another term for getting killed.

  Our underwater breathing equipment would have made this mission so much easier, letting us swim beneath the surface without any bubbles floating up. No one would have a chance of seeing us, even staring right in our direction with binoculars or high-mag scopes. But no Drägers on this swim.

  As Toro and I hit the halfway point, we could finally see the outline of the target vessel on the far side of the pier. The moon wasn’t full but it was bright enough for some visibility. And a string of high-watt floodlights ran the full length of the pier.

  Even from this distance, the ship looked huge, far more massive than either of us expected. Silhouetted against the pier, it was high and dark and ominous. The bridge shot up from the stern like a prefab apartment complex. Flags were fluttering from the bow. The deck was mostly empty except for a crane and some other large machinery. A ship like that could haul an immense load of gear.

  Toro and I decided to turtleback the rest of the way in. That would be quieter, swimming on our backs with our blackened faces just above the water, kicking in powerful, smooth strokes.

  It was right then that we got our first lucky break. On the pier between the target vessel and the shore we noticed that two of the floodlights were out. That created a clear, dark stripe all the way across the water. To us, it looked like a perfect entrance ramp.

  Shielded in the darkness, no one spotted us as we got closer and closer to the ship. Soon we were close enough to hear the voices of the sentries up on the pier.

  “Any sign?” one of them asked.

  “Nothing,” another said.

  They had to be talking about us.

  We followed that darkened path until we were underneath the pier, maybe three hundred yards from the bow of the ship.

  It’s always eerie under a pier at night, the perfect environment for a couple of adventure-seeking SEALs: the shadows from the pilings, shafts of light slicing through the grates above, the echoes that the tidal surges cause. Our first few weeks of combat-swimmer training, it seemed like all we did was swim in and out of the underbellies of creepy wood and concrete piers. This one was typical. I spotted a couple of old fishing nets torn on barnacles and a busted, half-open crab trap someone had left behind, ideal for snagging a swimmer’s wetsuit. We could hear footsteps and voices over our heads.

  Those sentries, we knew, were on high alert and actively looking for us.

  A ship at night has its own rhythm, its own special heartbeat. Especially in port, a ship this size can sound like a living thing. And this one almost seemed to be talking to us. Creaking against the rubber bumpers on the pier. A huge bilge pump disgorging water. Fuel lines taking on diesel. Machinery groaning like human digestion. There were bells and whistles and voices shouting. Gulls and other seabirds were squawking away.

  We wanted to reach the aft of the ship, where the propeller, the propulsion system, the power plant, and the engine would be. If an explosion went off there, the damage would be catastrophic. That part of the pier also happened to be lit up like a high school football field on Friday night.

  Our best shot, Toro and I decided, was old-school. We would have to swim underwater, piling to piling, slowly making our way under the pier. The pilings were thirty yards apart. I knew we had enough lung capacity to easily swim twice that distance underwater if we could see where we were going. But this water was shoe-polish black. If our aim was off even a little, we’d be totally exposed.

  “Heroes or zeros,” Toro said with a shrug.

  We both took several deep breaths. On my count, “One, two, three,” Toro and I slid below the surface and swam with locked arms. We didn’t want to risk losing each other. We aimed for the next piling and hoped for the best. Signaling with arm tugs, we came to the surface one at a time. We made the first piling perfectly. On the second one, we were just a few inches off but not too bad. Then I crashed into the next piling, slamming my right shoulder and head.

  Man, that hurt.

  And just to make our piling-to-piling journey even more difficult, every five minutes or so a small fishing boat came circling through, sweeping a high-beam searchlight beneath the pier.

  Every time that happened, Toro and I had to hold our breath again and duck below the surface. Only when the boat had passed could we slide back up for air.

  One time, just as I came up, I saw the search boat moving toward us and I shot back down, holding Toro under with me. It was just like we were back in SEAL training again, doing our underwater knot-tying drills in the combat-training tank. Those forced breath holds hadn’t gotten any easier since then.

  I couldn’t see the look on Toro’s face. But I knew exactly what he was thinking: “I want to kill you, sir. I’m running out of O2 down here.”

  A few more pilings and we were there—not just at the target vessel but directly beside the ship’s stern.

  “Get this limpet off my back and ease it in place,” I whispered.

  Treading water inches from the ship’s hull, Toro slid the limpet mine out of my pack. He swam down on another breath hold and gently placed the mine against the hull, a good four feet below the waterline.

  I swam down to check the magnets.

  “Secure,” I said to Toro, surfacing briefly.

  Then I swam back down and attached the time fuse.

  “Capped in,” I said.

  We both let out a huge sigh of relief.

  Now all we had to do was get the hell out of there.

  It was the final challenge in an elaborate port-security exercise at Roosey Roads. They had plenty of warning. The Navy’s ship’s commanders knew we were on our way. They were on full alert and waiting for us. Several times in the pre-planning briefing, the ship’s executive officer had used the phrase “when we catch the SEALs.” Not if. When.

  Getting to the ship had gone far more smoothly than we had any right to. But we needed our good fortune to continue. We still had to get out of there and safely back across the bay. Really, the only choice we had was getting out exactly as we had gotten in. Piling to piling, on breath holds, then quietly turtlebacking out into the bay. That’s when I really feared we were about to get caught.

  Just as we broke the cover of the pier, we saw four sentries standing immediately above us. They were out there smoking cigarettes, staring almost directly our way. This is a lesson our enemies often fail to heed. When you smoke cigarettes, you kill your night vision. You’ve got the glow of the cigarette distorting your eyesight. The smoke is floating into your face. And people who are smoking usually aren’t paying such careful attention to what’s going on
around them.

  “Don’t look at ’em,” I said under my breath to Toro. Humans have an innate sense of when people are staring at them, the way you can almost feel it when someone’s eyeballing you in a restaurant or across a crowded room. I didn’t want to risk that.

  “Just don’t give them any reason to tap into that sixth sense,” I told Toro.

  It worked. None of the smoking sentries noticed a thing, and we made our way swiftly back across the bay.

  Toro and I didn’t say a word to each other until we were three-quarters home. Kicking on our backs in the water, staring back at the scene of the crime, we were both superstitious enough not to want to jinx it. Finally, I broke the silence.

  “Holy shit, we did it,” I said.

  “Amazing,” Toro agreed.

  As soon as we hit the far shore, we called our chief on a radio we’d hidden there.

  “Please tell me, ‘Mission complete,’” the chief said.

  “It’s done,” I told him.

  “Five minutes, I’ll meet you at extract.”

  In five exactly, he pulled up in the junker van.

  “My boys!” he said with a huge grin on his face. Our wetsuits still dripping, Toro and I climbed inside.

  The chief drove straight to the guard post at the front gate of the port’s main pier. “Hey,” he told the sailor at the gate, “we need to talk to the officer of the deck right now. Let him know the SEALs are here.”

  The sailor must have misinterpreted what the chief said. He seemed to think the chief meant that the SEALs had been captured during the training mission—not that they had succeeded in planting their dummy bomb. The guard called his executive officer and announced into the phone: “We got the SEALs,” he said.

  “All right, you got ’em,” we could hear the XO saying. “Where did you catch them?”

  At that point, the sailor looked past our chief and saw Toro and me standing there. With our faces still covered in camouflage, we were a scary-looking pair. When the sentry got a clear look at us, he must have realized we hadn’t been caught at all. Staring at Toro and me, he quickly revised his explanation on the phone.

  “Um, actually, sir, I was mistaken,” he told his XO. “The SEALs are here.”

  “Tell him the SEALs planted a bomb,” the chief whispered.

  “As I understand it, sir,” the guard said, “there is a bomb on the ship.”

  There was dead silence coming through the line. After a moment, I heard a cold, commanding voice: “Show them up to the bridge.”

  No other victory came close to what I felt as I walked along that pier and onto the bridge of that huge Navy ship. We marched past every single sailor with a gun, including the four who had been smoking cigarettes. I had to stop myself from saying, “You four are the ones who should have caught us.”

  We were still dripping water with every step we took. As we walked along, everyone seemed to be curious. I could hear people ask, “Did we catch them? Where did we catch them?”

  The sailor who was escorting us shook his head glumly. “No,” he had to say, fifteen times at least.

  When we reached the bridge, there was the XO who the night before had briefed everyone on the port security exercise and what would happen “when” they caught the SEALs.

  “I thought for sure we’d get you guys,” he said.

  “We know, sir,” I told him.

  “So what’s the deal?” he asked, the gravity of the situation finally sinking in.

  “You have a bomb on your ship,” I told him. “Look, sir, you’ve got to run your security drill tighter.”

  He had to wake the captain, who had left orders to be alerted specifically if something like this occurred.

  A couple of minutes later, the captain stepped calmly onto the bridge. Under the circumstances, I thought he was extremely gracious and cool.

  He looked at Toro and me and said, “Did you get us?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Well done,” he said, as he began firing off orders to his crew. “All right, XO, launch the emergency action drill and get boats in the water. I want the EOD techs out there. I want everybody.” For the next thirty minutes, we just sat there with the XO and the captain, listening to their whole drill. Eventually, word came back over the radio.

  “We have an explosive device on the skin of the ship.”

  That’s what they were hoping not to find, undeniable proof that the SEALs had won.

  If that had been an active limpet mine and it really went off, the ship would have suffered devastating damage, and the captain knew it. He was making sure everyone else on the ship knew it, too.

  These dangers are frighteningly real.

  Something not so different had just happened in the Yemeni port city of Aden to the USS Cole. The U.S. Navy destroyer, feeling safe and secure in port, was hit by suicide attackers in a small boat packed with explosives, killing seventeen American sailors and injuring thirty-nine others. It was the deadliest attack against a United States naval vessel in more than a decade, and it exposed major weaknesses in port security.

  “I really appreciate it, boys,” the captain told Toro and me. “Let’s wait until tomorrow and you guys can debrief us on how you got it done.”

  “Sounds good, sir,” I said.

  It was after 2 a.m. when Toro and I and the chief got back to the team. But all of BRAVO Platoon was up celebrating. People were cracking open beers. The chief pulled a couple of cigars out of his pocket and handed one to each of us.

  Our relative inexperience didn’t go unnoticed. I loved it when I heard one of the senior guys say, “I guess these FNGs are good to go.”

  I would hate to have been aboard the Navy ship that night as the captain and the XO were grilling their crew, the ones who were so certain they would get the SEALs.

  “Really, how did they do that?” I’m sure they were saying, scratching their heads.

  9

  TERROR AGE

  The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight, and the only reason a warrior fights is to win.

  —MIYAMOTO MUSASHI

  * * *

  When you’re at war, you live a lot on instinct—hunch, feeling, and instinct. Pair that with obsessive training. It’s the only insurance you can get in a battle zone. A fishy bump in a field, a pile of trash on the road, a house that just looks different from the other houses. Will it get your whole platoon killed or is it nothing at all? Your brain at war always cycles at a higher rate of interpretation.

  Something like this happened almost every day. We were in our Humvees on the way to a target, driving a planned route through an area that we knew. All of a sudden, “Shift right!” the lead driver shouted over the radio as his truck and then the other three screeched into a hard-right turn at fifty miles an hour, veering onto a small dirt road no one even knew was there.

  Everyone stayed with the lead guy, even when we didn’t know where he was going or why.

  “Vehicle One, what the hell was that?” I radioed up from Vehicle Two.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It just didn’t feel right.”

  “Roger.”

  Everyone understood exactly what he was talking about. Everyone was 100 percent good with that.

  * * *

  It was just another day in paradise, September 11, 2001. That’s how it started, anyway. One of the chiefs was in his little cubby in the back of our platoon hut with the TV on. “Hey, Diesel,” Chief Hall called out as I walked in after my morning run along the water. It was a few minutes before nine, Puerto Rico time.

  “Come in here. You see the tower?”

  At first, I wasn’t sure what tower he was talking about. Then I heard the news anchor say that a plane had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. No one seemed to know at first whether it was an accident or something more ominous. But when a second plane hit the South Tower, all doubt was gone. And the attacks kept coming. A plane at the Pentagon. Another plane on the ground
in Pennsylvania.

  “This is the real deal,” I said to the chief.

  He just nodded.

  The whole world had changed for everyone. Or so I thought.

  Word flew across the base at Roosey Roads. In five minutes, ten team members were standing in front of Chief Hall’s TV, all staring intently.

  Soon enough, “Did you hear?” was giving way to “Where are we going?” and “How soon do we leave?”

  We were combat-certified warriors, U.S. Navy SEALs, trained, equipped, and ready to roll. Responding quickly to crises—that’s who we were. Within a few more minutes, the team members were trading theories about the likely first stops. There were so many possibilities.

  Pakistan, so torn. Yemen, so tragic. Syria, so brutal. Somalia, so out of control. Iran, that great enabler of terrorism.

  “Cheney’s been talking Iraq lately,” someone suggested.

  “Maybe Venezuela or something down here. That would be wild.”

  This was all the rankest speculation. But if we were about to be trading theaters, it was impossible not to wonder what was next. There were so many troublesome countries that could have launched the terror attacks or given aid and support to the zealots who did. We wouldn’t be the first responders. That job belonged to the heroic fire-fighters, police officers, and medics in New York. But we would be the first international responders. We could just taste it.

  We double-checked our flyaway bags, one for every conceivable environment: A jungle-warfare bag with light cammies, drain-hole boots, and insect repellent. A cold-weather bag for mountainous terrain. It had everything in layers plus climbing gear and snowshoes. A bag for ship attacks with wetsuits, hooks, and other maritime-assault gear. We needed to be ready for anywhere.

  We all gasped together, watching those towers fall. But I’d be lying if I said that moment didn’t stir something else in me. As a wave of sadness and patriotism swept across America, I knew as SEALs we’d be called on to render justice. Within hours, we figured, President Bush would issue an order. That order would slide down the chain of command. A C-130 would be gunning its engines on the Roosey Roads runway. Forty-eight hours, seventy-two hours max, we’d be flying like bats out of Puerto Rico, going wherever the most urgent action was.