13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi (20 page)

None of those discussions mattered to the operators already on the ground in Benghazi. The members of the Annex’s GRS security team had long since concluded that they couldn’t wait for outside help. They couldn’t wait for drones or gunships or Marines stationed in Spain. They
couldn’t wait for Special Ops teams in central Europe or the United States, or even their fellow GRS operators and Special Ops soldiers en route from Tripoli. They couldn’t wait for action by the presidents of the United States or Libya, or the secretaries of State or Defense. They couldn’t wait for the United Nations, the United States Army, Air Force, Marines, or Navy, the Libyan Air Force, or anyone else.

The Special Mission Compound in Benghazi was overrun. Buildings and cars were on fire. Armed enemies of the United States roamed freely inside the walls. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and communications expert Sean Smith were missing inside a burning villa. Five other Americans also were in danger.

The operators’ only option was to act. At the Annex, Oz prepared to withstand and repel a possible second wave. At the Compound, Tanto and D.B. headed toward the back gate. Rone, Jack, and Tig rushed through the front gate.

None had any idea what would happen next.

J
ACK TORE THROUGH THE
C
OMPOUND GATE BEHIND
Rone. As he passed under the entrance archway, he saw the back of Rone’s orange plaid shirt some twenty-five yards ahead of him. Rone sprinted toward the flaming, smoke-spewing villa, and Jack followed in his wake.

As Jack came onto the Compound’s manicured grounds, he cut sharply to his right, a move that took him off the brick driveway and onto a thick swath of well-tended grass. From there, the Compound wall would serve to partially cover his back, in case their enemies followed him through the gate. His rifle at his shoulder, his finger near the trigger, Jack dropped to a knee. He scanned back and forth, right and left, covering Rone.

To Jack’s right, past a row of low hedges and several palm trees, he saw the burning 17 February barracks building. His every sense hyper-aware, Jack heard scattered gunshots ring out from somewhere inside the Compound.
Jack didn’t see any shooters in the darkness and he couldn’t tell from which direction the shots originated. He knew that he was vulnerable and exposed, but he wouldn’t move until Rone was clear.

When Jack saw Rone reach the villa, he sprang to his feet and ran to join him near the building’s charred front entrance. Two DS agents who’d been searching for the ambassador and Sean Smith were already there. They stood to the right of the blown-open front doors, on the patio area near the low window that the DS agents had used in their repeated forays into the safe-haven area in attempts to find the missing men. The operators and the DS agents gathered in a loose circle by the four-foot pile of sandbags stacked along the patio’s edge. At their feet were clods of dirt and shards of pottery, remnants of a smashed two-foot clay planter.

One of the DS agents who met Jack and Rone was Scott Wickland. Suffering from smoke inhalation, his lungs scarred by diesel fumes, Wickland had climbed down from the villa roof to rejoin the rescue effort. Jack barely recognized him. Wickland looked like a chimney sweep, his boyish face and light-brown hair coated in black soot. Red vines of broken blood vessels covered his heavy-lidded eyes. Wickland’s shoulders slumped. His feet were bare. His clothes were blackened rags. The other DS agent, standing alongside Wickland, was big David Ubben, drooping from fatigue, his T-shirt smudged with ash, his meaty face slack. Only days earlier, the four men had sat outside the villa discussing their worries about the understaffed Compound security team; now their worst fears had been realized.

For a few seconds no one said anything, as the two
former SEALs and the two DS agents looked at one another in disbelief. Ubben and Wickland shook their heads and looked at the ground. They’d trained for this and had known that it was possible. They’d responded to the best of their abilities. But now it was real and awful, and it wasn’t nearly over.

From the corner of his eye Jack glanced toward the open front doors. The villa’s entrance foyer was dark, but through the smoky haze he could see red-hot coals from the wood of incinerated furniture, smoldering on the ruined marble tile floors. It reminded Jack of looking inside a wood-fired pizza oven. He could feel the intense heat pulsing from within.

His voice hoarse from smoke, Ubben broke the silence: “There’s still guys in the building.”

Immediately Rone and Jack went to the window at the far end of the patio. Wickland, Ubben, and the two DS agents from Tripoli had already gone through it multiple times, and now the window hung crooked in its frame, attached to the building from only one top corner. Jack didn’t know where the Tripoli-based agents had gone, but he got the impression that Wickland and Ubben were on the verge of collapse. He could tell that they were deeply relieved to see him and Rone take over the search for Chris Stevens and Sean Smith.

As they rushed to the window, Rone and Jack shared a brief, can-this-possibly-get-worse look. Jack believed that it would take a miracle to pull anyone out alive, and they’d need to be vigilant if they wanted to get out themselves.

Jack climbed through the window into the bedroom in the villa’s safe-haven area. The moment his feet hit the floor he felt the most intense blast of heat he’d ever experienced.
The only comparison he could think of was opening an oven door on Thanksgiving after a turkey had been roasting all day. His nose and eyes recoiled from the noxious vapors and caustic diesel smoke. Sharp fumes from burning textiles and plastic added to the stench. Jack felt his contact lenses dry out instantly. He wondered if they might melt against his eyeballs.

Rone and Jack took deep breaths and held them for as long as possible. They bulled their way past furniture and mattresses strewn around the bedroom from the DS agents’ previous searches. They went as far as they could, as fast as they could, inside the bedroom. But with no clean air, that wasn’t far. They rushed back to the window for fresh breaths. With each trip inside, they tried to reach deeper, to push themselves farther on a single chestful of air, even as they knew they were tempting fate.
Go too far, or take a wrong turn, or lose your way in the dark
, Jack told himself,
and you’ll be a missing man, too
.

Coughing and feeling light-headed, Jack and Rone began to alternate their searches of the safe haven, taking turns going inside the villa through the window. Time after time they emerged alone. Frustrated that they couldn’t explore the far reaches of the safe haven, they tried going in through the front doors. Depending on which way they went, the operators might be able to sneak in a few tolerable breaths inside and search a minute or two longer. But inevitably the furnace pushed them back outside.

In much of the villa, visibility was a few feet or less. Rone and Jack lit the flashlights mounted on their weapons, but the white beams barely penetrated the smoky blackness. They moved or lifted whatever furniture they came upon, in the hope of finding their missing countrymen
underneath. Anyone still inside was likely to be on the ground, they reasoned, so they focused their searches close to the floor. The heat was slightly less intense down low, but their feet still baked in their boots.

Jack felt a wave of gloom.
There’s no way in hell that they could possibly be alive
, he thought.
There’s no way to survive this for more than a few minutes.

Yet he and Rone continued looking.

After more than a dozen attempts each, Jack and Rone grew discouraged that they still hadn’t been able to reach some parts of the back half of the villa. Each time they’d tried, they’d been forced out by the smoke and heat. From outside on the patio, they ran around to the rear of the building to see if they could get in another way. They heard pops of gunfire in the distance, but the attackers had fallen back from the area around the villa and were nowhere in sight. Still, Jack and Rone moved on high alert, guns up, elbows tucked close to their torsos, heads swiveling, eyes scanning for targets.

They found an open back door and stepped inside. But it was just as dark, hot, and smoky, and they couldn’t explore far before they were forced back to the door for breaths. After several attempts with the same dispiriting results, they abandoned that approach and moved outside. Jack ran around to the front of the villa, expecting Rone to follow. But in the darkness the two operators became separated.

Jack continued alone toward the patio area near the bedroom window.

Tig had approached the villa by running up the same brick driveway and across the same grass field as Rone and Jack.
He reached the building while his fellow operators were inside searching. No one was on the patio when he arrived, so Tig positioned himself behind the sandbags to create a perimeter defense while he waited. When he’d first entered the Compound, Tig saw a Libyan man in camouflage pants and a T-shirt walking away from the burning 17 February barracks. The man was unarmed, and he seemed to belong there, so Tig didn’t shoot him. Otherwise, Tig found the Compound quiet except for the crackling of burning buildings.

As he stood near the sandbag fighting position toward the front of the villa, Tig heard loud noises and crashing sounds from inside. He heard someone kick in a door. Tig wasn’t sure who was inside, but he concluded that the racket must be coming from Jack, Rone, DS agents, or militiamen overturning furniture and clearing rooms. As Tig waited for them to emerge, he was startled by the sight of a gray Land Cruiser speeding around a corner in front of the villa.

Here come the bad guys
, Tig thought.

He raised his belt-fed machine gun and followed the SUV’s movements with the weapon’s barrel. Tig prepared to unload as the vehicle drove past him toward the front of the villa. At the last second before he opened fire, Tig recognized David Ubben’s face through the windshield. Also in the vehicle was one of the Tripoli-based DS agents.

Tig took his finger off the trigger, lowered the machine gun, and exhaled.

When Jack returned to the front of the villa, he found several 17 February militiamen going in and out through the main entrance, trying to help with the search. Jack went
to the patio and poked his head inside the bedroom window, intending to try again. Immediately he saw two DS agents, Dave Ubben and the taller of the two agents from Tripoli, coming toward the window through the smoke wearing gas masks. Jack’s first thought was to wonder where they’d gotten the gear and how he could get similar masks for himself and his fellow operators.

As the agents grew closer, Jack’s smoke-strained eyes focused. The two DS agents stood on either side of a limp man, dragging him toward the window. The man faced upward, wearing dark jeans and a gray T-shirt. Dave Ubben and the Tripoli agent each had the man by an arm, holding his torso and bald head off the ground. His legs and rear dragged along the ashy floor. Jack leaned through the window and reached out with both arms. When the agents approached, Jack slid his hands under the man’s arms and locked them in front of his chest. Jack pulled the unresponsive man up and through the window, then gently laid him on a concrete pad protected behind the sandbags. Jack didn’t recognize the man. He couldn’t tell whether he was American or Libyan.

Jack dropped to his knees to the right of the man’s head. He knew from his SEAL training that even before trying to establish an airway, he needed to make sure the man wasn’t in danger of bleeding to death. Jack lifted the man’s T-shirt and checked his torso for chest or stomach trauma. He found no signs of injury. No blood appeared to be seeping through his pants. Jack pulled up the man’s shirt all the way to his neck. He turned the man onto one side, to look and feel around his back for blood or trauma that might reveal internal bleeding. Finding none, Jack eased the man
down onto his back. The man flopped limply each time Jack moved his body or limbs.

Jack leaned down and put his ear to the man’s nose and mouth. He listened and felt for breath but found none. He searched fruitlessly for a pulse.

Jack’s hands were on the man’s bare chest, and he noticed that the skin felt deathly cold to the touch. He looked at the man’s face and saw a dark ring around his lips, from inhaling diesel smoke. Jack considered trying CPR, but he felt certain it would do no good. The DS agents stood over Jack as he worked, watching and hoping.