SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (9 page)

In the Navy it’s said that an officer can never do anything that a chief hasn’t already figured out, and as Greg Wilson and Frank Costello came out of their meeting in the stateroom, Mel walked into the TOC. He could read the skipper’s face. It was now 17:45, on Easter Sunday, daylight was over, and there would be approximately twenty-four minutes of nautical twilight before full dark.

Mel Hoyle reported that since the surrender of Abduwali Muse the bad guys were prairie dogging, sticking their heads up through the forward hatch and peering over the top of the pilothouse. They’d started to transmit on the bridge-to-bridge radio; channel thirteen crackled with the voice of subject Delta, Ghadi. What he said was largely unintelligible, a couple of words of pissed-off, broken English, and Abduwali’s name spoken again and again like a tape loop.

“They want their playmate back,” Wilson said.

“They aren’t going to get him,” Mel said calmly.

Overhead on the command set, the lifeboat was projected on half a dozen monitors from as many angles. Someone was standing in the forward hatch, and shapes, human shapes, flitted by the pilothouse windows. The light was fading quickly, and a layer of high clouds covered the stars. The moon was nearly full, for the last four nights it lit the sea like a parking lot—but tonight it would not rise until 8:00 p.m.

That gave the team two hours of near perfect, murky darkness.

Wilson, Costello, and Mel stood and watched the screens. On one roll, they could see directly into the pilothouse. Two men were standing close to each other, gesticulating, obviously arguing. As they watched one of them scooted out and peered through the back hatch. The head in the bow hatch ducked for a moment, then popped back up.

Wilson said, “How’s your view back there?”

“We own them, skipper,” Mel said. “We own them.”

“The sea state is building. It’ll be force three by 2200,” Costello said. “The swell’s already coming up.”

The ship was stable, the swell and the wind were not huge, but they all could occasionally feel the deck rise under their feet. It had been calm for several days, but it would not stay calm forever. Nor was their situation open-ended.

Wilson sat on an edge of the wardroom table and crossed his legs. His hands gripped the edges and he looked at the lifeboat and the positions of the other assets. He’d been awake himself for the best part of a week, living like Mel on caffeine but without the speedy benefits of Copenhagen. Wilson made himself think slowly, burning the position of all his teams into his mind, forming a perfect three-dimensional picture of the lifeboat, the assault boats, the destroyer, the carrier, and the submarine. Wilson was a graduate of the Navy War College and the Naval Postgraduate School. He’d studied Mahan, Groshkov, and von Clausewitz; all of them said it is dangerous, but necessary, to try to predict the actions of an enemy. Greg Wilson had five days of behavior to guide him. Five days of what they did. He’d been applying a steady pressure. It sucked in the lifeboat. He knew that. And he knew that the pirates could not be counted on to remain rational. Nothing could be predicted, but several things could be anticipated.

Wilson put himself in the position of the pirates, now one man down, with night falling. They themselves operated at night, and they knew, too, that the moon would not be up for more than two hours. What would they do?

They were pissed.

Were they pissed enough to kill the hostage?

No. That would be death. These guys didn’t want to die. They would if they had to. But they would not bring it on. If they shot the hostage, they knew they would be cut to pieces.

Predicting what an opponent will do is more art than science. Now Greg Wilson thought of Miyamoto Musashi, a sixteenth-century Japanese samurai who wrote a guide to life and the art of Kendo. The maxims in
The Book of Five Rings
had become old saws in Naval Special Warfare. They had even been taken up by bankers and businessmen, but Wilson didn’t allow the late fans to spoil the message. He watched the lifeboat heave in the low-light video. He put himself in the boat. He imagined what they could see on a hazy, dark, moonless night … almost nothing. In his head ran a principal axiom of
The Book of Five Rings
: “You must watch both sides without moving your eyes.”

Wilson knew he could watch both sides.

The pirates could not.

“We’re going to open a window,” Wilson said.

A “window” was a set time period where the snipers would be authorized to engage; the “green light” heard so often in action movies.

Wilson looked at Mel Hoyle. The master chief and the captain had known each other almost two decades. They were comrades, but not always friends.

“Can you go three for three?”

“It’s eighty feet, Skipper.”

“Three at once, Mel. I know the range,” Wilson said.

The TOC was silent. The ventilators hummed. Behind the workstations and laptops, technicians and watch officers sat still. Frank Costello crossed his arms. Mel Hoyle, master chief badass, king of snipers, was on the spot. He didn’t show it. The big man’s lip went up under the walrus mustache. It wasn’t as much a smile as a sneer.

“We can get them,” he said.

*   *   *

Full dark. In the lifeboat there was only a single light—the small digital numbers on the bridge-to-bridge radio showing the number “13.” They cast a small puddle of lime color onto the top of the throttle console, but lit nothing else. Bounded by windows, the lifeboat’s pilothouse was less dark than it was under the deck forward, but only because the night outside diluted the perfect blackness. Forward, on the starboard benches, the shadow was opaque and complete—like something solid.

The hostage Richard Phillips was awake now, or maybe just less asleep. He had ignored the arguments throughout the day. It was his policy to stay calm and to move as little as possible. He could not comprehend any of the lisping, sputtering things that were said, but he understood perfectly what was wrong. He knew to a perfect pitch what the feelings were.

When the bow hatch was opened, Phillips had taken pleasure in the smallest stirring of the air. The heat was less now, but it was not pleasant in the boat. The lifeboat had never been anything but a torment. The temperature was bearable only in the small hours in the morning, a few minutes before a damp, clammy cold set in, and then the sun came up and hammered the boat, making it ring inside with implacable heat. He’d counted the passage of time from night to night, telling himself if he made it through the day, the nights would be easy. His captors stayed up all night, watching, listening, they were quiet then, and he could curl up, pricking his ears, too, but unlike the others he could drop off to sleep—hoping for what they feared most.

But tonight was different. Abduwali, the English speaker, was gone. There was tension in the boat; it had flooded in all afternoon, as real as waist-deep bilge water. Phillips had opened his eyes and watched Ghadi yammer into the radio. He was surprised that they did not make him speak on it. Not that they could tell him what to say. Not that they would let him aft of the stanchion. He was kept in the forward starboard bench now, always, ever since he’d dived out the back hatch. They made him stay there, and even when he had to piss they made him piss into one of the bailers. Not that he pissed much. Phillips moved slowly onto his side. In the bow, Erasto had his head through the hatch, standing with legs spread, swaying as the boat rose and fell. Phillips watched him for a while, then stared deliberately at the blank wall. His wrists burned and his ankles were rubbed raw. His hips and legs were stiff and painful. He wanted to stand up, but the time to move safely was over. They were all wired up now and Phillips knew it. At dusk they were always on guard, especially right after sundown and just before dawn. That was when the oldest one prodded everyone awake … sometimes even insisting that Phillips himself sit up. It was too late to stand and stretch without causing a commotion. He must stay still now that night was on them. And maybe they would calm down after the moon came up and they could see.

Nadif stood against the back hatch, leaning against the wall, his head just touching the top deck. He was behind the wheel and engine console, three or four feet from the windshield. The orange bow moved up and down, and occasionally right and left as it plowed through the water. Nadif could see the stern of the ship, but not at all well. There were moments when Nadif could hardly see it at all, and though he knew it was there, it was as fleeting as a cloud shadow.

He looked through the back hatch into the sky. A few scattered stars flitted behind the clouds. Nadif knew there were airplanes there. And helicopters; twice they had been flown over and once they had pinned the boat in a blinding light. Nadif was certain they were there, but he could not hear them. Even when he put his head outside the pilothouse and held his head in the lee, he could hear only the wind past his ear, and the steady whisper of water down the sides.

Nadif ducked back inside, and was angry again.

“Who has tracers?” he said.

Neither Erasto or Ghadi moved.

“Give me a clip, idiot,” he barked at Ghadi.

The shadow standing next to him thumbed a lever by the trigger guard of his AK-47 and handed over the magazine. In the bow, Phillips heard the click, a hard metal sound in the fiberglass cocoon. He knew they could not see his face, but he watched the two shadows framed against the darkness of the back hatch.

Nadif’s face dipped into the small green pool of light behind the radio, and Phillips heard the
clink, clink clink
of bullets being thumbed out of the magazine onto the short plastic tray behind the wheel. Ghadi found one green-tipped bullet, then another. He pulled his own magazine from his rifle, stripped out a pair of cartridges, and replaced them with two tracers. He threaded the mag into the receiver and racked home the bolt.

Now Phillips closed his eyes. They were arguing again, but not furiously. Phillips thought it possible that they were going to shoot him, and he remained perfectly still and silent. If a hand grabbed him and jerked him up, he thought it would be the end. He had several long seconds to remember the sound of the bolt going home. Erasto moved, passing close to him in the darkness, and Phillips heard him climb up on the thwart.

No hand jerked him up. No one pressed a muzzle against his ear and Phillips allowed himself to breathe.
Not now. Not yet.

Ghadi picked up the radio microphone, pushed the squelch button off and on to attract attention, and droned singsong, quick-linked syllables in Somali, a goblin language. Phillips heard Abduwali’s name called repeatedly, but the destroyer did not answer. He turned his head slightly, again looking aft and up toward the hatch. Phillips saw Nadif pull himself up, his silhouette dark against the almost opaque night, and he could see the profile of the AK and its crescent-shaped magazine.

There was a small snick as the safety went down and Nadif steadied himself with one hand. He swung out past the port side window, and aimed the weapon up and forward. The gun went off with a loud metallic crash, and the inside of the boat was lit in a quarter flash, like a brief stroke of lightning.

Out of the front hatch Erasto watched as a single green round of tracer arced up into the sky and curved out over the ship. It arched up into the low, black sky and burned out somewhere to the north, a pale green falling star. The bullet had been aimed to pass by
Bainbridge
’s wheelhouse.

“They have to have seen that,” Erasto grunted. “They saw it. Tell them to answer us.”

Phillips had no idea what the words were, but they were not frantic; they had been matter of fact.

Nadif remained framed in the hatchway, the gun swinging in one hand. His voice was clipped, tight and angry. “Abduwali is a fucker,” he said. “An asshole and a faggot.”

Phillips saw Nadif duck back through the hatch, he saw him outlined there, a shadow against darkness.

“Fuck him! Fuck him! The turd!”

*   *   *

In the TOC, reports poured in of a single shot fired. The tracer had been seen and reported by Zorro 1 and 2. The sniper observers aboard
Boxer
rogered, and as the gunshot resonated through the hollow fiberglass shell of the lifeboat it was picked up on the submarine’s passive sonar and confirmed verbally on an underwater communications circuit.

As the data came in, Greg Wilson stood focused on the command set. He asked that the ScanEagle rerun the footage showing the shot. Within seconds one of the screen windows rewound, looped, and rambled forward. A single subject came out of the back hatch, raised his rifle, and fired one-handed over the top of the destroyer. Wilson watched as the man swayed outside the hatch, watching the glowing bullet fly off into the sky.

“Bravo,” said one of the Twidgets.

“What the hell?” Costello grunted.

“They’re trying to signal,” Wilson said quietly.

“They got two boxes of flares on the boat. And smoke.”

Wilson knew that even if Phillips showed them where the flares were, the Somalis wouldn’t know how to use them.

“I’m declaring an imminent threat,” Wilson said.

Across the wardroom, Frank Costello nodded. “I concur.”

Wilson picked up a Motorola 2600 radio from a charger rack and keyed it.

“Stoop Zero Seven,” he said. “This is Tango.”

Stoop was the sniper cell’s call sign—“zero seven” is the number given to the senior-most enlisted member of a unit. Stoop Zero Seven was Mel Hoyle’s personal handle.

Hoyle was now back in the TACTAS compartment. He had made room for himself on the bench, wedged between the primary shooting pair and the additional spotter. His eye was pressed to an MO-4 night sight, a compact 4X power digital scope. In it, he had the pilothouse framed. The MO-4 rendered the night into a light green day, the colors muted, but still discernable as reds, blues, and tans. The lifeboat was a dark green-orange, the foam sputtering from under its bow a pale crème de menthe. Mel could see faces through the pilothouse windows and he could see that they were clean-shaven. He could tell that they were holding rifles.