B009G3EPMQ EBOK (10 page)

Therefore the minority candidate who passes into DEVGRU becomes a member of the “Tier One” Special Mission Unit. He will be assigned to reconnaissance or assault, but his greatest specialty will always be to remain lethal in spite of rapidly changing conditions. From the day he is accepted into that elite tribe, he embodies what is delicately called “preemptive and proactive counterterrorist operations.” Or as it might be more bluntly described:
Hunt them down and kill them wherever they are—and if possible, blow up something.

Each one of that small percentage who makes it through six months of well-intended but malicious torture emerges as a true human predator. If removing you from this world becomes his mission, your only hope of escaping a DEVGRU SEAL is to find a hiding place that isn’t on land, on the sea, or in the air.

•  •  •

On the day Jessica was kidnapped, Barack Obama had long since made his move from Chicago to the American White House.
As the president of the United States, he had the services of the DEVGRU warriors at his disposal. By the time he received notice about the kidnapping, the most alarming aspect was the possibility that this was an organized act by Al-Shabaab, southern Somalia’s Islamist governing force with known ties to Al Qaeda, which is in constant conflict with Somalia’s internationally recognized transitional government. If they had taken her, the U.S. president and the rest of the world might soon witness a viral internet video showing the execution of a female American aid worker, while an anonymous voice-over delivered a lecture to all the Godless Ones and a stream of Arabic writing played across the screen.

Still there was no hard information to act on and no line of communication, thus nowhere to aim a DEVGRU team even if the president felt inclined to deploy them. So the report of the kidnapped American and her Danish colleague went into watch-and-wait status at the White House. Jessica Buchanan’s case took its place among a massive collection of other situations also standing by on the watch-and-wait status. Erik realized, coming from his line of work, that every one of them was a matter of great concern to somebody.

By far the largest conundrum facing the president was the provisional Somali government’s difficulty enforcing authority. While the northeast portion of Somalia, called Puntland, had achieved a semiautonomous status and managed to get a basic infrastructure going, the rule of street violence still reigned supreme throughout southern Somalia. Without a reliable structure to protect and guarantee shipping and commerce, there was no way for the population to rebuild a functioning economy.

Therefore desperation gripped a once proud and independent collection of clans and subclans, reducing many of their young men to the lunacy of sailing motorboats out to sea and attacking large ships and tankers with the intention of hijacking them for ransom. Every nonswimming teenager with a head-buzz of
khat
and a borrowed AK-47 who dared to ship out on such a mission was undoubtedly powered by the story of a neighbor or a cousin who made only one of the lethally dangerous raids and yet
earned enough to live on for years!

Of course the odds against any individual pirate finding personal success were about the same as the odds against hitting a jackpot at a roulette wheel. The compelling part was powerful, however, because it was better than the prospect of remaining on land and slowly rotting to death. The courage of despair drove them into small boats to sail far from shore and stage attacks so one-sided and absurd they would be comical if not for their deadly consequences.

And once in a while a comedy of errors ended up with a bamboozled shipping company breaking down and paying out millions of dollars to get back its vessels, their crews, their cargo. When such a massive payout actually went through, it landed as a giant pile of cash in a region where men of working age would fight to the death over a fistful of
khat
leaves. Word traveled at light speed:
The casino is open, boys.

Soon after the era of big ransoms began, hidden alcoves dotting the Horn of Africa played host to a variety of boats, ships, and tankers lying at anchor and awaiting ransom payouts. Captured crews were often held below decks in medieval conditions for months at a time. Many were killed in the initial attacks and others succumbed in captivity.

In the minds of their attackers, the victims’ collective guilt was simple; no matter what country a captive hailed from, it had to be a place with more opportunity than anything available in Somalia. After all, the captured crews came from places capable of building and steaming seagoing vessels across international waters, while the Somalis watched them sail by from the beaches of a stagnating homeland. The desperate attackers couldn’t concern themselves with the laws of other nations; they endured existence every day
with no law greater than that imposed by whoever had the weapons and the cohorts to use them.

But by this time in late 2011, the beleaguered insurance companies and shipping companies were finally starting to follow the lead of the crews themselves, who had begun to arm up and fight back. The prospect of a military-level private shooting war between pirates and the entire shipping industry attracted various governments, and those governments sent military forces to get things “stabilized.”

The whole world knew about the piracy case of the tanker
Maersk Alabama,
in which three Navy SEAL sharpshooters saved the imprisoned ship captain. Those SEALs spent a full day lying in wait with their weapons trained on the pirate boat, waiting for the kill command. When the order came down, they instantly fired their sniper rifles, with their own vessel bobbing at a different rate from the pirates’ boat, having no room for error if the captive was to survive. The snipers took out all three pirates in a single shot while sparing the kidnapped victim. Captain Richard Phillips was freed unharmed from the close quarters of that little boat, while the dead bodies of the three armed pirates slumped around him.

Details of DEVGRU training are not available to explain this feat of timing and marksmanship, but the results testify to its deadly effect. SEAL Team Six founder Richard Marcinko has said that his budget for ammunition for his men’s training was greater than that of the entire Marine Corps. The comment might be dismissed as braggadocio if not for undeniable results produced under intense and deadly pressure.

Consequently, by the time Jessica Buchanan was being marched into a pitch-black desert to her own mock execution two years later, the same people at the White House who took note of her disappearance had reason to wonder if it might be time for another visit to the region from the men you don’t see coming.

The Somali attackers knew they had reason to fear such a thing. They kept their eyes on the international press. Even in a land of nearly nothing, anyone who can mug a tourist can get his hands on a smartphone with satellite and internet capabilities. Then he will engage in that great irony so unique to the twenty-first century: sleeping on straw, dining on garbage, and surfing the internet’s endless images of everything a heart can desire.

Even if the websites are entirely religious or politically based, there are those darn ads, those pop-ups, those little typos that cause unpredictable sites to appear. In this fashion even a faithful man of religion with no desire to see the internet’s baser temptations may find his bitterness steadily increasing while he encounters products, so many products, every single thing he might dream of, and more—much more than he ever imagined. A fountain of temptation squirts into his eyes through hypnotic imagery, while the sexuality employed to sell, sell, sell it all fills him with rage because it affects him so strongly.

The battery on that device will die, of course. When it does, he might not have a way to charge it, but he knows how to get another one. Pandora’s box has been opened. Every viral eyeful of the world’s temptations amplifies his frustration. With time comes the attitude:
Why not snatch one of those rich bastards? Grab them! Make them get money from their rich bastard friends and rich bastard relatives. What, you make
thirty thousand
USD a
year
? Pay up, rich bastard.

You can become a kidnapper and play the long odds, or you can bend over and take it from the whole world. Three choices greet you: Scrape out a life in a legal way, chew
khat
and wait for the deliverance of death, or take a desperate gamble.

The warships successfully protected merchant shipping in the region by beating down most of the piracy, for a while. The world’s ship commanders and company chairmen and concerned stockholders all breathed a bit easier every time another group of
desperados went down in a firefight or were captured and sentenced to long prison terms.

However, on land in Somalia the desperation didn’t change at all, simply because pirates were sometimes gunned off the water. The desperation simply reversed and ran back toward the shore. Its progress was invisible, and the people on land were unaware of its danger.

Thus the men who once fired away at giant steel tankers from tiny boats out on the high seas now prowled Somalia’s inland regions. They crossed into neighboring countries carrying the same hungers that first put them out to sea.

Terrible forces were in play, as dangerous and random in their violence as lightning strikes. For anyone in range of this storm, victimhood was a matter of timing and location.

Jessica:

Our executions were about to proceed, and there was nothing we could do. We were forced onto our knees somewhere in the wilderness of the Somali scrub desert region, and the terror of those moments was made more awful by the waiting. I remembered it, then, not with my thoughts but with my body itself—the old feeling of being rendered helpless in some game of childhood cruelties. The memory was in the survival instinct’s sharp sting: that feel of wrongness over being held captive.

I discovered a special form of living hell in that combination of helplessness and terror to be endured while waiting for execution. No doubt the horror of this moment is known to all condemned people. They would surely recognize that sensation of sharp nausea, the loss of fine motor control, the difficulty with balance when smaller support muscles spasm and misfire.

Any victim taken by force is subjected to a complicated group of insults to his or her humanity. Your freedom, well-being, mental state, physical state—they all suddenly mean next to nothing.

I knew so little in those dripping minutes, but it was more than enough to leave me stranded in the compliance mode, legs
trembling. I knew these men despised female emotion. It’s a common trait in the culture. A woman’s emotional plea is regarded as an unfair and dishonest attempt to manipulate circumstances in the female’s favor. It is looked at as being done without regard to consequences for the male. The emotions themselves are therefore an affront to him: a honeyed attack. So short of jamming my fist in my mouth, I did everything to tamp down my rocketing emotions. I could see nothing there in the darkness, down on my knees, facing the ground. I could sense nearby men surrounding me, some of them standing still, some pacing the ground, all with guns. But I couldn’t see any details at all.

When the human body moves beyond the “fight or flight” response, the best thing our ancient instincts can do is prepare for grievous injury; pull the blood supply away from extremities and toward the major organs, and throw out one last grab for survival. I felt the massive adrenaline surge contract my muscles so hard they began to seize up.

In most cases these symptoms would immediately be lost to permanent silence with the coming of the end. But the moment hung suspended. Nothing happened. More nothing happened. Enough time went by for stabbing knee pains to set in, throbbing with my pulse.

My back muscles started to twitch. I tried to pray for help and found that my fear was so intense it dissolved my thoughts into a formless plea for strength. So I focused on controlling my breathing:
Stop gasping
,
take deliberate breaths.

And then one of the men yelled out, “Sleep!” They pushed us to the ground. “Sleep! Sleep! Sleep!”

Sleep? Just like that? You can keep your head for now. Just sleep.

I hated the instinctive gratitude that washed over me, but in that moment the word “sleep” was wonderful. It was a reprieve, and it came across as something close to mercy. It meant for the time being we had permission to exist, to keep breathing. The
knife blades and rifle bullets weren’t going to be coming for us on this night.

But of course, neither were they going away. So there was no real sleeping to be done that night, more of a fitful dozing that alternated consciousness with dreams. When daylight came and I was still alive to see it, I cheered up a bit in spite of the groggy and surreal hangover left by the lack of rest.

With the coming of a new day they marched us to a new spot. I began to wonder if I would be spitting in the eyes of fate by daring to think about getting out of there. Poul indicated he was trying to mentally record anything he could that might be useful against these guys if we survived. While it wasn’t a plan, it was a piece of one; I began gathering any information I could. There was no way to know what might be useful, so I just tried to observe everything and commit as much to memory as possible. Our main focus was on the kidnappers themselves, since the temporary locations they ducked us in and out of didn’t really make much difference. They kept us outdoors the whole time.

The region was sparsely populated. The only other people we saw were glimpses of wandering nomads, always passing. They seemed not to see us, detached from the doings of outsiders, as they have been for centuries.

I began to put forth a timid question or two in spite of the belligerence exuded by the men. The first problem was to determine who their “leader” was. Poul broached the topic, and together we tested the situation, using pidgin and pantomime to ask if we might be permitted to place a call to our NGO. We weren’t going to be allowed to make phone calls, but it was important to see who would make the decision. I tried to convey the idea that our people would surely be worried about us, but that was a difficult idea to mime.