SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (31 page)

Rich ordered his guys to tear the place apart and find the Strela missiles intel said might be there to guard Osama. It was imperative that they be found. No helicopter within two miles would be safe unless the missiles were captured—and the two Chinooks were their ride home. The Stealth Hawks couldn’t carry them all.

*   *   *

The SEALs had been in the compound for less than five minutes when the Command Bird landed and Scott Kerr led his assault element to the compound’s front gate, slapped on a breaching charge and blew it open. A thunderclap rolled over the city of Abbottabad. If they didn’t know the SEALs were in before, they did now. The explosion could be heard for miles.

Across the city, fingers flew over keyboards and keypads, tweeting and e-mailing about the explosion and the helicopters now circling the compound. No one had tweeted until the Chinooks came on station. The Stealth Hawks had lived up to their billing.

Scott came into the compound followed closely by a communicator—one of the Det Alpha satcom maestros. He went past the blown gate, with its sharp smell of cordite and cut steel, and into the smell of the barnyard, the animals and the chickens.

Razor 1 now held the third floor. Razor 2 was placing a second charge to blow its way into the ground floor of the main building.

A voice came out of the darkness: “Who are you?”

“The skipper,” Scott’s communicator answered.

It was one of Razor 2’s breachers who asked. He was preparing a firing device and a piece of NONEL instantaneous fuse.

“Better find some cover, Skipper. We’re going hot.”

Scott and his guys crouched behind a cement wall.

“Fire in the hole.”

WHUMP.
There was a blinding flash, and then came the deafness felt by the SEALs closest to the explosion. Without being told, Razor 2 boiled through the hole blown into the wall of the main house. Within seconds, a dozen men were on the ground floor, spreading in all directions, checking in rooms and behind closet doors.

Someone was waiting for them in the dark. Arshad Khan was stunned by the force of the explosion and disoriented. He pointed his AK-47, but the SEALs saw him before he saw them. Two shots were fired and he toppled over dead in a ground-floor bedroom. His weapon was found under his body. He was not given time to use it.

SEALs do not wear helmet cams—if they were to be issued, it is likely that they would become the most frequently malfunctioning equipment in the U.S. military. SEALs are many things, and they are not politically naïve. They know very well politicians would love nothing more than to ponder over video recordings of the split-second life-and-death decisions they make in combat. Days and weeks after the danger, their split-second life-and-death decisions would be picked apart by armchair commandos in Washington.

Had cameras been worn into the main house, it would have looked like the lobby of an elementary school. There were whiteboards and desks and books.

“Fire in the hole.”

Another explosion, this one high and sharp. A steel-cutting charge had blown open the metal grate that secured the ground floor from the floors above. Pieces of the gate banged off the marble floors and fragments found ground-floor windows to fly through. The smoke cleared, and Scott started up the stairs.

“We’re coming up! Hey, goddamn it, we’re coming up!”

“Panama!” was shouted by the men upstairs. It was the challenge and response—the way to tell friend from foe.

“Red,” came back the answer. Tonight’s challenge and response.

Scott Kerr came up the stairs to the third-floor landing, and saw a body.

“Whose is it?”

“We’re working on it, Skipper. It’s either Hamza or Khalid.”

A voice called from upstairs. “Here, Skipper. In here.”

“Six is moving. Be advised, Six actual is moving.”

No accidental shootings tonight.

Scott entered the third-floor hallway. A SEAL stood guard over Khairah, her face streaked with tears. The third-floor lights had been turned on, and she was surrounded by huge men with guns. She had no idea if she would live or die. Osama had told her that the Americans would murder her on sight. Scott Kerr looked at her face. He knew who she was.

“Number three,” said Frank.

“Yeah. We’re gonna keep her up here until we go. No point in spreading the news too far.” Frank wasn’t a squadron commander for nothing. Keeping the captures separated by location also prevented them from fabricating stories about atrocities. Even though the SEALs took precautions, several of the noncombatants would tell stories that Osama was captured alive and then murdered. The Pakistani press would spread this story, even though it was told by people who were not in the main house or on the third floor at the time of the assault.

Scott went into Bin Laden’s bedroom. Amal was leaning against a wall, her wounded leg thrust out in front of her. She, too, was sobbing.

Kerr did not recognize Amal’s face. But she was in pajamas, she was in Osama’s bedroom, and she was the right age for number four. He walked over to the bed.

Osama had been pulled off the mattress and laid face up. His photo was taken and the data chip was handed to the communicator. He put it into a reader attached to his satellite radio.

Kerr looked into the face of the man who had brought down the World Trade Center and started two wars that had lasted a decade. The Predator round had blown out the back of his head. Bin Laden was dead, but not one person on the Team thought this meant an end to Al Qaeda or to terror. Not by a goddamn long shot.

“It’s him,” said Frank Leslie.

“It is.” Kerr stood. “Get a DNA sample.” As soon as Kerr saw Bin Laden’s body, he communicated the news to Admiral McRaven in the Joint Operations Center. The SEALs’ intersquad radios were not monitored by higher command. It was up to Scott Kerr to communicate with the admiral back in Jalalabad, and it was Bill McRaven’s job to communicate with Washington.

Scott Kerr thought back to the day at JSOC headquarters when he was told about Neptune’s Spear. Until ten seconds ago he never really believed … He thought it was all going to be … He didn’t know what, but he didn’t think that four months later he would be standing in Pakistan, looking down at the corpse of Osama bin Laden.

Kerr turned to the Red Squadron leader. “What happened?”

“Easy day. We got onto the roof. No one heard us approach. In five seconds we were on the terrace. We were in the hallway in thirty. One was coming at us up the stairs. He got tagged, and the door opened. Crankshaft stuck his head out, saw us, and slammed the door. We kicked it in, and were on him.”

“What happened to number three?”

“She was on the end of the bed, both feet on the mattress, sort of squatting and holding up the covers. He jumped across the bed behind her. We shot. One miss. One went through her leg and two went into him as he was diving across the mattress.”

“What was he doing on the bed?”

“He was going for this.” The Red Squadron leader held up a short AK-74. It was the AKSU that Osama always posed with. The gun was as famous as he was. Scott Kerr looked over the weapon. It had been fitted with a special forty-round extended magazine. Kerr jacked back the receiver and a shell tinged onto the floor. It was loaded with armor-piercing ammunition.

“We got a Marakov 9 mil pistol, too. Behind the bed.”

Scott handed the AK back to Frank. “This is for Red Squadron.”

“Hoo yaa, Skipper.”

Frank was a squadron leader, an operator, but he, too, had a drop of the politician in him. “Maybe the admiral would like the pistol, sir. Compliments of the Red Men.”

Kerr smiled.
Hell,
he thought,
I’d like to keep it myself.

While the communicator went to the terrace and set up the satcom, Kerr had a minute or two to look around the room. It was fairly neat, and someone had placed two cheap pictures on the wall—decorative art, abstracts sort of. Kerr was also aware of the stuffiness of the room. To him it smelled like boxes of clothing kept in a musty garage.

He soon had a satellite and established voice communication. Kerr got on the satcom and contacted the JOC. He was talking on encrypted voice, one of the least secure methods of communication, and he used the brevity codes that had been established for the operation. He knew that his words would be heard not only by his boss, Admiral McRaven, but in Washington as well.

Scott started with what he considered most important: “Apache okay.” No SEALs dead, wounded, or missing. He continued, “Tomahawk negative at this time.” They had not found the Strela missiles—if they had ever been here at all.

“Comanche, Chippewa, Echo. KIA.” Bin Laden’s courier, al Kuwaiti, and Arshad Khan, enemy, killed in action.

“Chappo, Echo. KIA.” Chappo was the war chief Geronimo’s son—and the code name given to Khalid bin Laden. The message meant that Khalid was dead.

“Cochise, Echo. Mike at this time.” Bin Laden’s second son, Hamza, had been given the code name Cochise. He had been thought to be in the compound. If he was, they hadn’t found him. If he had run away, then he was more invisible than a Stealth Hawk. The SEALs had established an airtight perimeter. Hamza was Echo, Mike. Enemy and missing.

Kerr got to what they were waiting for. He said slowly, “Geronimo, Echo. KIA.” Osama bin Laden was dead.

*   *   *

At CIA headquarters the director squinted through his glasses at the typed sheet that had been transmitted to him when the mission launched. It was the list of brevity codes. He’d listened to Scott Kerr’s voice as he went through his list, following along with a pencil a bit like a bingo player. Finally, he heard a word that really meant something. Geronimo.

Panetta was connected to the White house via General Webb’s laptop. He had been chirping in via a small video window of his own, adding what comments he could. All he had to go on was the feed from the Sentinel drone. It had showed only the outside of the building. It was an agonizing fifteen minutes before Scott Kerr confirmed that Osama was in the building and had been killed.

Panetta was delighted to pipe in, “Geronimo, E, enemy. Killed in action.”

The president said, “We got him.”

Later, pictures from the White House situation room would show several famous faces watching the target feed in rapt attention. Secretary Clinton would be shown with a hand over her mouth—looking horrified. Others would look stoic.

The photograph does not show President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and Vice President Biden at the moment they learned Osama bin Laden’s fate. The picture was taken minutes later, when it looked like catastrophe had finally caught up with SEAL Team Six.

On the video feed a helicopter had just crashed.

Leon Panetta said nothing. He had no idea what was happening. And neither did anyone else.

*   *   *

Razor 1 was finally able to settle and land on the roof of the house. During the assault, it remained there, rotors turning, doors open. It was then ordered to lift off and land outside the compound so that the operators could be reembarked. The crew chief climbed aboard, the doors were closed, and the engines surged. The night sky above the compound was crowded.

In Earth’s orbit, four satellites were watching. Twenty thousand feet above Abbottabad, the Sentinel flew in a lazy circle, its cameras turned on the objective—it was streaming video to the Joint Operations Center in Jalalabad, and that video was being relayed in real time to Leon Panetta at CIA headquarters and the White House situation room.

At an altitude of three hundred feet, the Chinook helicopter designated as the Gun Platform was making slow quarter-mile turns around the compound, watching for troops or vehicles coming to the garrison stationed at the Kakul Military Academy less than a mile from Bin Laden’s front door.

Razor 2 was still on perch, hovering at fifty feet above the apex of the compound’s southern perimeter.

Departing from the roof of the main building, Razor 1 headed for a landing spot along the road one hundred yards west of the Command Bird. In the pitch-black darkness, the Stealth Hawk crossed over the narrow walled driveway bisecting the compound. Slowly, the helicopter started to drop. Losing altitude, Razor 1 canted sideways. It began to rotate clockwise, until its tail was pointed east and it was flying backward. An important component of the flight deck controls had failed. Called a “green unit,” this removable system controlled flight inputs and communications, and managed navigational problems. In spec ops it is often said that, “One is none, two is one.” The green unit in the Stealth Hawks was considered important enough to have a backup system. Razor 1 could fly perfectly well with just one functioning green unit, but it could not fly with both of them off-line. And both of them went out at the same time—a million-to-one shot. Almost gracefully the doomed Razor Hawk sank tail-first into the large, walled enclosure east of the main house.

The snipers and air crew aboard Razor 2 watched in horror as dust started to tornado up from the sprawling animal pen. The Stealth Hawk settled so gradually that a cow and two buffalos had time to amble out of the way. Then the helo’s landing gear thumped into the ground and the machine bucked upward and started to spin in a wrenching, high-speed circle. These were Razor 1’s out-of-control death throes. When it hit the ground a second time it was with such violence that the helicopter broke into two pieces.

For ten seconds the rotors flailed in the dirt and the fuselage flopped around like a fish thrown on a dock. Finally, mercifully, the rotors broke off, the engines flamed out and the pieces stopped. All of this started so moderately and ended so violently that it astounded everyone. Washington had no idea what had just happened. All the Joint Operations Center knew was that a helicopter, a Stealth Hawk, had just crashed.

Two operators had bagged Osama’s body and were taking it down out of the ground floor of the main house when they heard the sound of a high-pitched buzz … almost a shriek. Scott Kerr ran out of the main house and looked up. He had not seen the crash. Because of the high walls and the several tasks the SEALs were carrying out, very few of the assaulters knew what had happened, either.