The Delta Solution (26 page)

The rumors about Delta Platoon reverberated around the largest navy base on the West Coast. Everyone knew they were there, everyone saw them go out and return, but no one knew quite what they were doing. Even when it rained and squalls swept down San Diego Bay, those SEALs were out there, by day and often by night, all night.

A few destroyer captains had been informed of the special training and instructed to cooperate with any request from Commander Bedford. However, even they were not briefed on the SEALs’ ultimate mission. A few guessed, but no one spoke. Delta proceeded under the highest classification. It was so secretive they hardly dared speak to each other, certainly not to their families.

After the boarding phase, they would move immediately to advanced helicopter attack operations—the technique of bringing in a big doublerotored troop carrier under the cover of a gunship swooping low, with fixed machine guns blazing—a form of air-to-ship assault generally believed to be unstoppable. Especially when conducted by this crowd.

Meanwhile they kept right on hurling and climbing, scaling the hulls of the Pacific fleet, twice as fast as climbing the wall at the Coronado O-Course. And all of them were outstanding at that.

SHEIKH SHARIF HAD DECIDED on a night attack on Haradheere. His battle plan was detailed. Immediately after dark, he sent his two mortar teams forward to a position 1,000 yards from the north wall of the Salat redoubt. Up front he placed two forward observation officers with cell phones, men who would call back the range once the mortar bombs, each weighing 7.5 pounds, had launched and landed, probably too far, beyond the garrison.

The remaining members of the force were fanned out in formation, flat on their stomachs, and ordered to advance with all speed on that north wall once the mortars had found their range and softened up the target, exploding in Salat’s courtyard.

Working in the dark, the mortar teams had a difficult task. Their medium-range Russian weapons had a simple but sensitive mechanism consisting of a barrel that could be raised and lowered by a bracket fixed to its tripod. Thus if the first bomb sailed clean over the town, the forward observation men would call back, “Overshot three hundred yards. Raise the barrel!”

The next shot would blast higher and steeper, and the bomb would hopefully travel less far and possibly land on-target. But even with very skilled men, it might take two or three tries. Sheikh Sharif’s men were not very skilled, and when they finally unleashed their opening mortar shot, they nearly blew themselves up.

The time was 8:00 p.m. Inside the redoubt, Salat’s machine gunners had their Russian-made night glasses trained on the scrubland north of the wall. Mustapha and Abdul, Yemen-born members of the al-Qaeda assault force, had the mortar barrel in position aimed straight at the garrison. Too low. A lot too low.

Sheikh Sharif yelled into his cell phone, “
BEGIN THE ATTACK!
” Mustapha shoved the shell into the barrel but forgot the speed with which the device explodes the moment the shell strikes the firing pin, which is, in effect the base of the barrel.

The Russian bomb launched out of the barrel with a blast and a
whoooosh!
It shot past Mustapha’s head, singeing his hair and missing his face by about two inches, and rocketed fast and low straight at the garrison wall. Abdul nearly fainted with fright, hearing Mustapha’s yell of terror.

The guards saw the bomb coming as it screamed through the night, flew overhead, over the garrison, over the town, and landed in the sand dunes, close to its maximum range of almost two miles.

Down in the sand, two hundred yards north of the wall, Sharif’s forward observation man shouted into his phone: “Too far, hundreds of yards too far.
RAISE THE BARREL! GET A HIGHER ELEVATION! DON’T FIRE AGAIN UNTIL YOU’VE DONE IT.
”

By now, al-Qaeda’s mortar-two was ready to go, but the barrel was raised very high and when it fired, the shell blew about 1,000 feet into the air and exploded in the desert, less than one hundred yards from the observation men, who were slashed with flying sand and gravel.

Up on the wall, the pirate helmsman, Abadula Sofian, ducked when the first mortar bomb ripped through the night air but was up and looking when the second one blasted skyward. His big twenty-pound Russian PK machine gun fired at the rate of 650 rounds per minute. Box-fed, 6.72 millimeter caliber. Range: 1,500 meters.

Abadula opened fire with short bursts straight at the point he thought the second mortar was sited. The bullets ripped past the al-Qaeda bombers lying flat in the sand. Two other Salat machine gunners also opened fire, and the ground was raked with deadly 6.72-millimeter shells.

Mustapha had never been this scared. Lying next to the Russian weapon, he knew it would betray his position if he dared fire it again. Mustapha fled, running through the desert, right into the guns of his own force, who, deciding he must be a crazed tribesman, opened fire and killed him stone dead.

By now all forms of secrecy or clandestine attacks were history. The guards on the wall knew they were facing a major attack, and the Islamists in the sand knew they had been spotted. Elmi Ahmed, the ex–brigade commander in the war-torn suburbs of Mogadishu, was also on duty on the north wall but held his fire until he had a target.

Moments later he had one. Abdul adjusted the range and slammed the next bomb down the barrel, hurling himself sideways as it hit home on the base firing pin. The missile blasted out on a much lower trajectory and dropped in the street, just outside the main gates to the compound, where it detonated with tremendous force.

Abdul stayed low, and Elmi Ahmed let fly with a short volley and then two more. A bullet ricocheted off the mortar itself, but nothing hit Abdul. He answered his phone to the forward observation officer, who yelled: “GREAT SHOT! May have damaged the main gate. Raise the barrel one tick, and fire again.”

Abdul, who had fought the Americans in the backstreets of Kabul, wriggled forward, made the adjustment, and shoved another bomb down the barrel. This one ripped through the night down a perfect line and landed in the courtyard of Salat’s garrison.

Like most mortars, this was a high-explosive fragment round, which had greater lethality the harder the ground on which it landed. The interior of the courtyard was solid concrete, and Abdul’s mortar blew out the door to the accommodation block and injured three guards, one fatally.

Elmi, up on the ramparts, was again faced with total darkness and like the experienced street fighter he was, he ceased fire and called to his colleagues to do the same. “We’ll see them soon enough,” he snapped. “And we may need every round we have. Don’t waste anything.”

By now Sheikh Sharif’s second mortar team had recovered their composure and fired two more bombs in quick succession. One flew wide but another hit the compound and bounced off the office block next to Salat’s home, blasting two of his windows.

Mohammed rushed out of the house, where he had been speaking on the phone to Admiral Wolde on duty on the west wall observation post. “Is everyone okay up there?” he called, and Abadula shouted back, “Okay, sir. Elmi just gave the order to take out the mortar nests at all costs.”

“Good idea!” exclaimed Salat, but his voice was drowned by the sound of both heavy machine guns on the north wall opening up and once again raking the ground in the dark. Even as they did so, another bomb flew overhead and detonated in the street beyond the gates.

Sheikh Sharif gathered his troops. The forward observation guys had informed him they had hit and damaged the garrison, but the defensive fire was intense from off the north wall. Sharif, however, understood that
a ground attack was his only objective—to break into the compound, take control, and then find the pirates’ cash store. A standoff out here in the desert, firing long-range, was not an option.

What Sharif did not know about siege warfare would have filled the Great Mosque of Damascus. He had no idea of the strength of his enemies; it could have been a couple of dozen men, or less. Equally it could have been two hundred trained machine gunners.

In addition he hadn’t the slightest idea of their arsenal, whether they owned RPGs or even mortars of their own. Neither did he know if there were troops outside the compound who would be called into action.

“
CHARGE!
” bellowed the Sheikh. “
LET’S GO! RIGHT NOW. FORWARD, MY BRAVE BROTHERS OF ISLAM!
”

He ordered his vehicles to fall in behind and his force to divide, with thirty men charging straight forward, firing at will, carrying the light siege ladders. The rest were to make a wide swing on his left flank and come at the garrison on the eastern side. His storm troopers would open the gates once they had scaled the walls.

Sharif’s forward commanders were told to make their assault fast but silent, and they ran through the sand and brush with their courage high. They uttered war whoops of encouragement and shouts of joy for the victory to come and sometimes broke brittle twigs as they pounded over the ground, all of which was sufficient to alert Elmi Ahmed that his enemy was on its way.

“Stand firm,” he snapped. “Don’t fire until you can see something. And then fire at will. On my command.” There were now two heavy machine guns on the north wall, plus four other guards armed with the lighter, more manageable AK-47s. They had more ammunition than the Red Army and a mortar that Hamdan Ougoure was manhandling in the courtyard, loading it with an illuminating-round with its time fuse set to eject a parachute-suspended flare. Seconds passed and Ougoure rammed in the shell, which blew skyward at a steep angle, about four hundred yards out over the battleground.

There was a sharp crack from the screaming missile, and then a brightblue, flaring light burst into the sky, lighting up the area below like Yankee Stadium. Sheikh Sharif’s running troops were suddenly out in the open. For thirty-five seconds, 300,000 candela (the military’s basic unit of luminous intensity) floodlit the barren plain, with the main force of Sharif’s
men now only three to five hundred yards out, smack in the range of defending machine guns.

Night had briefly turned to day.

Elmi Ahmed, assuming a loose command on the ramparts, ordered: “
FIRE AT WILL!
”

The two high Russian machine guns opened up a withering field of fire, the barrels swivelling to and fro, across the vanguard of the enemy attack. In the first thirty seconds they poured more than six hundred rounds into the al-Qaeda force. The four other guards, selecting their targets with care, fired nonstop, cutting down the Arabs who would steal the pirate gold.

The attackers went down two and three at a time. As they fell, the flares above them died, and only the cries of the wounded could be heard. Ahmed’s gunners kept going. With their ample supplies of ammunition, they fired steadily into the dark until the veteran pirate called it off. Sheikh Sharif himself had taken four bullets full in the chest and was dead before he hit the ground.

In less than a minute, every one of the thirty al-Qaeda attackers was dead or dying, although the full horror of the carnage would not be seen until first light. By then there would be no survivors, because each of these men had, without exception, taken an average of five or six machine-gun bullets.

Meanwhile, the second wave of Sharif’s assault was swarming around to the east and was regrouping five hundred yards short of the wall. Their knowledge was limited. They knew their comrades had successfully bombed the courtyard, and they had seen the giant flare in the sky. But they were too far distant and running too fast to look back. The volleys from the machine guns had confused them and they had not known who was shooting whom. They were receiving no instructions because their CO’s cell phone was dead, like its owner.

Unknown to any of them, Salat had summoned Colonel Patrick Zeppi at the very outset of the one-sided battle, and with supreme organization, he and fifteen of his warriors came charging around the corner of the west wall, from which Admiral Ismael Wolde and his men were already firing at the incoming al-Qaeda second army.

Colonel Zeppi’s troops, many of them veterans of other Somali wars, stood back, close to the garrison, and let fly with their Kalashnikovs, coming at the raiders from their left flank.

The instant slaughter was, if anything, worse than that which Elmi and his men had inflicted. Some of the al-Qaeda men had gone down in the opening volleys; others had turned to run back to the east toward the coast. Others had kept going straight, racing for the town, trying to find cover from the merciless barrage being aimed at them with massively superior weaponry and huge volumes of ammunition.

No one made it. Mohammed Salat had been preparing for this day for many months. Sporadic raids by al-Qaeda forces and heavy-handed demands for a share of the pirates’ prize money were commonplace in the north on the shores of the Gulf of Aden. But al-Qaeda was getting desperate, and Salat’s view had long been:
They might be successful somewhere else, but they’ll never break down Haradheere
.