Kill Bin Laden: a Delta Force Commander's account of the hunt for the world's most wanted man (5 page)

He didn’t dare to speak to the other passengers, since he was trying to pass as an Afghan. When the jitney crossed tribal lines, he had to contend with armed checkpoint guards who were hungry for whatever booty for passage they could draw from the unsuspecting and unprotected strangers on the little bus. Discomfort and danger he could handle. It was the stench trapped inside the small minivan that was his worst problem. As he jolted along, Shrek prayed for a head cold and a stuffy nose, and wondered:
Don’t these guys ever take a friggin’ bath?

The rest of us set up back at the air base to plan the hit, and we would spend days reviewing possible courses of action, throwing out ideas or techniques we knew would be useless for this particular mission.

There were about three dozen buildings in the general target area, and just to the south, four more buildings were built into a 60-degree slope that ascended to the west behind them. Ahmed would be in one of those four. Below the houses was row after row of damp, terraced farm fields that stair-stepped down to the rocky valley floor.

Recent satellite imagery showed hundreds of bomb craters that were still recognizable, even a year later. Several days were spent conducting a detailed terrain study that led to a big decision: We discarded the use of helicopters for insertion. After weighing the risks versus gain and the chance of compromise, we decided to go with our own version of the Trojan horse. Of course, it was not a new idea.

In 1400
B.C.
at a place called Troy, the Greeks built a large wooden horse as a gift to the Trojans, who had proven to be a formidable foe after two deadly engagements. The Trojans accepted the strange present and hauled it through the gates of the city wall. That same night, following several hours of strong drink and feasting, the Trojans fell into a deep sleep, allowing Greek warriors Achilles and Odysseus, along with a couple of dozen commandos, to silently slip from the horse’s belly and attack. The legendary impregnable city of Troy was sacked.

Delta had first contemplated using the Trojan horse concept back in 1979 while developing courses of action to rescue the fifty-three American
hostages seized by Iranian militants in Tehran.
*
During the months of planning for Operation Eagle Claw, one option was to drive across the border from Turkey and into Iran hidden in the back of trucks. The overall option was discarded as being too risky and providing zero flexibility, but the idea remained.

The final plan for that Iran raid was to go in by helicopter to a rendezvous point roughly fifty miles from Tehran, load onto civilian trucks stashed at the hide site, and drive to the target area under the cover of darkness. Once at the embassy compound, the bearded operators in blue jeans and black dyed army issue field jackets planned to scale the ten-foot wall and rescue the hostages. That entire mission, of course, was aborted when a sudden sandstorm intervened, wrecking helicopters and costing lives.

At this point, I must preserve some details of our own updated Trojan horse scheme in Afghanistan to protect the tactic for future operations. Suffice it to say that if a bored Afghan militiaman at a roadblock separating tribal lines looked in the back of either truck, the farthest thing from his mind would be that the actual load was a dozen American commandos on a business outing.

We procured a couple of standard Afghan cargo trucks that suited us just fine. White tarps with large innocuous lettering stamped on the sides were tied to rusty metal rails along the truck beds. It was critically important that the trucks appear normal to casual or curious eyes. They had to appear boring, but simultaneously also be obvious, and appear as large, loud nuisances that needed to be quickly moved out of the way so things could be brought back to normal at any checkpoint. We would be hiding in plain sight.

But to make it work, we also had to surrender some advantages. There would be no sandbagged floors to protect us from the blast of a land mine, tossed grenade, or roadside bomb, and no armored plating to provide
360-degree protection from gunshots or shrapnel. That sort of heavy protection would add a lot of weight to the trucks and make them sag on their axles, and therefore draw unwanted attention.

Twenty-two Delta operators donned desert camouflage fatigues kitted up with black or green Kevlar helmets and green, black, or tan vests with ceramic plates to provide basic lifesaving protection against the thundering velocity of a 7.62mm round fired from an AK-47 rifle.

All of us wore custom-sewn web gear that resembled souped-up Batman belts more than anything military. These vests provided a pocket or clip for everything imaginable—various explosive grenades, flash-bang stun grenades, six thirty-round magazines of 5.56mm ammunition, six spare pistol magazines, quick-tie tourniquets, flex cuffs, Spyderco or Horrigan special knives, handheld infrared pointer, Garmin GPS, spare batteries, tubular nylon, snap link, Leatherman tool, mechanical breaching tools, explosive charges, and fuse igniter systems. Finally, we also had one item that none of us ever wanted to use—special medical kits to stop a buddy’s bleeding, or your own.

Each helmet was adorned with state-of-the-art flip-up ANVS-9 night vision goggles, or NVGs. Peltor ear protection, of the type worn by shooters and hunters, was connected to each operator’s interteam personal radio. Each operator was armed with personalized suppressed M-4 assault rifles and the sidearm of choice—M-1911 or Glock variant—all professionally tooled and pampered by the best gunsmiths in the world. The year before, we had dressed for battle in garb indigenous to the country. This time we carried a lot more bells and whistles.

Most guys wore a subdued three-and-a-half-inch-by-two-inch American flag velcroed on their shoulder, chest, or helmet. Some chose a full-color flag and others chose the patches of the New York City Fire Department or the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department. A few mavericks had patches that I have no idea what they represented. All wore black and luminous yellow call sign patches on their shoulders—a common practice in every special operations unit and since adopted by many conventional units.

In Delta Force, the uniform standard is largely personal choice. Sure, some things are required, such as the color of fatigue top, needed to recognize friend or foe while moving through dark back alleys and shadowy hallways, or the specific equipment that must be carried by each team
member. But comfort and efficiency are the most important factors in dressing for close combat. Bloused pants, shined boots, and starched fatigues are hard to find inside Delta. As long as an operator can do his job on target—slide down a rope from a hovering helicopter, enter the breach, eliminate the threat efficiently, and dominate the room—why should I care if he wears a Mickey Mouse patch or one from his local hometown bail bond service? Time is precious and we spend it on the important stuff and take great care not to get run up a tree by the proverbial Chihuahua.

In Delta, big-boy rules apply.

As things came together, we broke another operator, Ski, away from a staff job he had been assigned to do at Bagram to go down to the Jalalabad safe house and give Shrek some company. Ski was more than happy to get away from the computers in order to have the possibility of some action. A Green Beret in his previous life, Ski’s jet-black hair hung unevenly from under his wool hat, reached his collar in the back, and hid his forehead and even his eyebrows in the front. His beard was so thick that it ran up his cheeks to just below his eyes. When he spoke, it almost seemed as if a ventriloquist were nearby, because if you were hard of hearing, the only indication that he was talking was the jerky up-and-down movement of the Marlboro cigarette between his lips.

Shrek and Ski sent back photos and exact grid coordinates of Mr. Gul Ahmed’s residence, and our intelligence shop confirmed it was the same building we originally suspected based upon our conversations with the CIA and the Alabama Green Berets. With that information, it was time to launch.

Shrek also had solved the mystery of a strange and eerie monument that had defied identification by our imagery analysts.

Standing just to the east of the Ahmed home was a large rock formation that appeared naturally left after thousands of years of flowing river water following centuries of melted winter snow snaking down from the mountains. The large rock was roughly the size of eight tractor-trailers all turned on their noses, with their tails straight up, and glued together at
their sides. It appeared on the imagery as a giant rectangular cube with rounded edges.

A worn footpath wound around the rock and ended at the top, where a small mosque was under construction. The doorway was visible on the east side, a design that allowed an entering Muslim to face to the west—toward Mecca, birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad—to perform his daily prayers.

Outside the square mosque were the mounded, rock-covered graves of al Qaeda fighters killed during the previous battle of Tora Bora. They were at peace in paradise now, exactly what they wanted. There were at least fifty individual graves, complete with individually carved tree trunks and makeshift limbs of various lengths pointing skyward. Six to ten feet high, these staffs were adorned with red, green, white, tan, or blue scarves, flags, or torn pieces of clothing that the fallen warrior had worn in battle. The colored banners and pennants fluttered and waved peacefully in the wind.

It crossed our minds that Usama bin Laden might actually be buried in that graveyard, which was already well known locally as an al Qaeda monument and was becoming a popular stop for Muslims desiring to pay their respects to the martyrs.

It was logical that if Ahmed had provided shelter for bin Laden, and if the ailing al Qaeda leader had succumbed to his wounds and expired, then moving his body several hundred feet to this memorial was not out of the realm of possibility. We pulled out photo imagery from the past year that showed the mosque was constructed several months after the battle.

This thought, however intriguing, quickly moved into the too-good-to-be-true category. It would have been virtually impossible to hide a burial site of bin Laden that was so accessible to tourists and the faithful.

Nevertheless, the place was a stark reminder of the cost of war. We were happy that these Tora Bora fighters had paid the ultimate price.

First blood was spilled on our mission before it really got under way. At midafternoon, we piled into some pickup trucks for the short drive out
to the MC-130 Combat Talon aircraft that was waiting for us on the asphalt runway, with her engines already turning. When one of the pickups took a sharp turn, a large piece of equipment shifted in the cargo bed, smacked a young operator named Rip square in the nose and catapulted him out of the bed of the truck. His Kevlar helmet and body armor protected him upon impact with the runway.

Our medic, Durango, went to work to stop the facial bleeding and mend the wounds enough to get him on the plane, although I think Rip did not know where he was for a few minutes. After we loaded and took off, I made my way over to Rip, who was staring straight ahead, stoic as ever, and holding a bandage on his nose. His dark beard was matted with the thick red blood, adding even more menace to the long wavy hair and piercing eyes. I bent over to his ear and yelled to be heard over the engine roar. “You gonna make it?”