SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (10 page)

Mel pressed the send button. “Go Tango.”

“Send your traffic.”

“Two, armed, pilothouse. One, armed, periodic, bow hatch. No cargo.”

A terse, emotionless statement of the target. Two bad guys visible through the windows, one popping in and out of the bow hatch. No sign of the hostage.

Wilson’s voice came again in his earpiece: “Are you getting flushes?”

All three shooters, visible, were a flush. Two was a deuce, one was a loner.

“Affirmative.”

“Stand by. We’re going to open a window in approximately zero five mikes.”

“Copy, zero five mikes.”

In the TACTAS room, there was a communal exhalation. After nearly four days of waiting and watching, now would come a shot. Or maybe not. It was time to turn on the Zen. Behind the primary weapon, Mike Buckwalter twisted the gain switch on his MO-4. He centered the small white cross on the starboard pilothouse windshield. There was no moonlight to reflect off the glass, none at all, and when the bow of the lifeboat was down, he could plainly see the head and shoulders of two men. One wore a T-shirt. One wore a light-colored checked number with a tattered collar. Bravo and Charlie.

Buck looked over at Doug MacQuarrie, his spotter, and across his back to Mel, his boss. The third spotter, Bubba Holland, was opening the bipod on his PS2, folding it down, checking the magazine and chambering a round. When Mel entered the compartment he ordered all three shooters to pick a target. He’d said nothing else, except for them to “make a hole” for him on the platform.

Mel in their mix and the skipper on the tactical net. Everyone knew a shot was likely to come. They’d seen the tracer, and heard the radio traffic. They were on hide, in the stoop, and they didn’t ask questions. They would often go the entire four-hour shift without speaking. Their heads were down range, their minds focused on perfection. They listened, and they aimed.

In the darkness, a jade-green circle of light was projected onto Mel’s cheek. He wore no expression that anyone could name; it was his shooting face. The platform groaned as the ship rolled. There was almost a half ton of men, sensors, radios, and weapons on it. Buck and Doug were positioned behind the starboard, outboard bung, two muzzles down range, and Bubba behind the port side opening, inboard. Mel was positioned slightly behind Bubba, his weapon was hanging behind them on one of the reels—the match-grade M-14 he shot each year at the nationals. Mel was holding his spotting scope up on his crooked elbow, steadying it with his left hand clutching his right wrist. The shooters pulled their weapons into the hollows of their shoulders, tucking them firmly. They were all still physically, and now they went through the rituals of quieting their breath.

It was not time to go on line. Not yet. They all knew the window might never open. They all knew there might not be a shot at all. Not tonight, or not ever. Dealing with the now is what they had to do. They would not anticipate orders, and they would not be frustrated when orders failed to come. The snipers held their weapons in an easy ready; they watched and they waited at cool zero.

*   *   *

In the greenroom on USS
Boxer,
the standby snipers comprising Stoop Zero Three, Frank Bracken and Sean O’Hallaran, pulled their armor over their heads and quickly fastened the buckles, snaps, and Velcro that held together their kit. Both pushed earpieces into their ears, pulled on their helmets, and snapped down their night vision goggles. They stepped onto the blackness of the flight deck, led by a yellow shirt toward the gray SH-60 helicopter turning up on spot two. It was go time.

For three days, Bracken and O’Hallaran had been on five-minute standby. Geared up, they squatted on a single nylon cot in the ten-by-twenty-foot room adjoining
Boxer
’s flight deck. Their meals were brought up, and their coffee; one of them always on the radio, one always rogering the communications checks, keeping an ear to the tactical frequency and the separate sniper’s net. For three days the Scan Eagle Feed came over a black laptop perched on O’Hallaran’s pack—every inch of the lifeboat, every curve, every nook, and blind spot was burned into their brains. Now the laptop, the live-action feed, was snapped closed and stuffed into a day pack. They snatched up their rifles and jogged toward the helicopter.

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.