13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi (35 page)

As he ran toward the rear of the building to reach the ladder, Tig called on his radio: “Hey, guys on Building C, you guys OK? You guys OK?”

“Yeah,” came the Team Leader’s reply, from inside the building. “We’re fine in here, we’re good.”

“Not you!” Tig shouted. “The guys on top of the fucking roof!”

The T.L. didn’t respond, and neither did anyone on the roof. After a pause, Tig heard Jack’s voice fill the silence on the radio: “I see no movement.”

Atop Building D, Jack had been watching the neighboring roof intermittently since the first explosion. When the third, fourth, and fifth explosions hit Building C, he saw black plumes of smoke rise from where Rone and Oz had been firing into Zombieland only seconds earlier.

Jack couldn’t see the fallen men, who had dropped below the parapet and were blanketed in smoke. But in the
quiet that followed, Jack thought he heard someone groaning in pain. Even that was more promising news than he’d feared. Jack considered it doubtful that anyone on Building C could survive a single direct mortar hit to their location, much less three. His heart had clenched when he saw the last two explosions.

As Tig climbed the ladder to the roof, Jack continued to scan for signs of life, even as he remained on guard for enemy action to the north or west. While Jack waited for word, he stewed over how accurate the mortars were. Three direct hits on a relatively small rooftop were as remarkable as they were lethal.
They had to have somebody spotting them
, he thought.
Somebody was around, probably at an elevated position looking down at us. They hit the wall, and then they corrected and those last three were right on target.

It also occurred to Jack that the attackers had targeted the single most important and most crowded building inside the walls. Building C housed the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility and the operators’ Team Room, which logically made it the Command Post, and therefore the most likely place for Americans to have taken refuge.
To be that accurate
, Jack thought,
that precise with those mortars, they had to have been very proficient, and they had to have known the exact location of that building
.

Maybe their enemies had done it by dead reckoning, a product of trial and error with help from a concealed spotter. Another possibility was that the attackers had used latitude and longitude coordinates provided by a GPS device, perhaps in a car that drove up to the front gate, or on the smartphone of someone walking outside the Annex. It had occurred to D.B. that the man he’d seen walking outside the Annex might have employed a more primitive approach
to target locating: estimating distances by pacing them off on foot.

The more Jack thought about it, the more he felt consumed by dread. Now that the enemy had dialed in the position of the Annex buildings, they might fire twenty or thirty mortars inside the walls. Every rooftop and walkway was vulnerable. Worse, Jack anticipated that the mortars were only the first wave of a full-on assault. As Jack envisioned it, first the attackers would soften up the American defenders by raining mortars on their positions. Then they’d move in on the ground with RPGs and heavy machine guns. Jack knew that he and his fellow operators would put up a ferocious fight, but eventually the Annex walls would give way. The outnumbered, outgunned defenders could hold out only for so long against an overwhelming force.

Considering what had already happened and the various ways the Annex might be overrun, Jack concluded that he’d reached the low point of not only the long night, but of his entire life. He feared that the men atop Building C were dead or dying, adding to the death toll of Chris Stevens and Sean Smith. Having somehow missed the radio call in which the T.L. said that everyone inside Building C was safe, Jack suspected that the mortars had penetrated the roof and killed some or all of them, too. It seemed only a matter of time before he and every other American in Benghazi were dead. He didn’t want to imagine what the radicals might do to their bodies.

Jack’s thoughts returned to the mortars. He thought about how powerless the Annex fighters were against bombs dropping from above.
You don’t know if it’s coming
, he thought.
It’s not like you can defend against it. You’re just out in the open. You can’t shoot back towards it. It’s basically
a lottery. If it’s your time, it’s your time, and death can come right out of the sky and kill you in an instant.

He heard the T.L. call on the radio for everyone at fighting positions to check in, by order of location. From Building A. Tanto called: “Roger, all OK.” D.B. reported that he was safe on Building B. Everyone waited to hear a voice from Building C. None came.

“Building C, check in.” Still nothing. “Building C?”

The silence confirmed in Jack’s mind that his worst fears had been realized for Rone, Oz, and Dave Ubben. It was hard to imagine that he could have felt worse, but that would have been the case if Jack had known that a fourth man was on the roof: His friend Glen “Bub” Doherty was up there, too.

Finally, Jack filled the empty radio space. “Building D, roger,” he said in a melancholy voice. “I’m OK.”

Like Jack, D.B. felt as though it was only a matter of time before more mortars hit them. He knew that he needed to cover the area east of the wall, but he also considered abandoning his post if he heard the thumps and whistles of incoming mortars. Then he told himself,
That’s actually pretty stupid. Usually the mortar round that hits you is the one you don’t hear
.

After the third mortar hit the roof, Tanto heard the squeal of tires from the area south of the Annex around the dirt racetrack. When no more mortars launched, he believed that some members of the ten-car motorcade had in fact gone in pursuit of the attackers and had chased them off.

At the same time, he wondered when he and the other Benghazi operators would get relief from the Tripoli team, all of whom except Glen remained inside Building C. He called to D.B. on the next rooftop: “Where the fuck are all these guys from Tripoli?”

Tanto returned his focus to a possible ground assault.
Need to get ready
, he told himself. He stared into the unfinished four-story building across the road to the south. Tanto told D.B. that he continued to hear voices in the field near the building, whispering and mumbling from among the weeds. D.B. tossed him a pair of binoculars across the narrow gap between their roofs, to help Tanto scour the building and the grounds nearby.

Between sweeps across his sector, Tanto called the T.L. to say that the ten-car motorcade escort had left. “It doesn’t look like they’re coming back,” Tanto said. “We’re gonna need another way to get out of here.”

As Tanto remained on watch, he felt as though he’d been prepared for everything that had already happened, and everything yet to come.
You don’t have time to feel sorry for yourself
, he thought.
You don’t feel sorry for anybody else. You can feel sorry once you’re safe and you’re sitting back and drinking a beer, and you can howl at the moon. When everything’s done, you can feel sorry.

With each rung he climbed on the Building C ladder, Tig swiveled his head toward Zombieland, watching for muzzle flashes to see if anyone was about to shoot him in the back. The attackers had stopped shooting after the third mortar struck the roof, but neither Tig nor any of the other Americans knew whether their enemies would
resume shooting, launch more mortars, or attempt to breach the walls and invade the Annex. They expected nothing less.

Tig leapt over the parapet and ducked low as he looked around the blackened roof. The sun still hung below the horizon and smoke still swirled, giving Tig only a few feet of visibility. “I need help up here,” he called on the radio.

The first man Tig spotted was Dave Ubben, propped against the parapet ten feet from the northeast corner, conscious but dazed, a pistol in his right hand. Tig knelt next to Ubben and grabbed the gun, worried that while in shock and pain the DS agent might mistake Tig for someone who needed to be shot. He tossed the pistol to the side and pulled out a headlamp from Oz’s medical bag. Tig flipped down a red lens cover to keep from painting a target for the attackers.

Tig saw that Ubben had suffered major injuries to his lower left leg and serious wounds to his left arm below the elbow. Tig pulled out both tourniquets from Oz’s medical bag. Just as Rone had demonstrated days earlier during the medical refresher course, Tig applied the first tourniquet to Ubben’s badly damaged leg. As he worked in the darkness, Tig accidentally raked his hand across the edge of one of Ubben’s protruding bones. The razor-sharp bone sliced through Tig’s skin, but he’d worry about it later. He moved to Ubben’s arm, tightening the second tourniquet just below the armpit. As he worked, Tig offered a steady stream of reassurances.

“Hang in there, dude.… You’re gonna be OK.… We’re gonna get you down.… It’s gonna be all right.… We’ll get you out of here.” Tig reached back to his days as a Marine and pulled out a motivational nickname for the toughest
among them: “Hang in, Devil Dog.” Ubben could only mumble a reply.

When both tourniquets were in place, Tig began to move away from the DS agent to see who else needed help. Ubben roused himself: “Hey man, I need my pistol!”