SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (27 page)

McRaven went past the hangars that contained the assault group’s helicopters. The hangar doors were closed tight and a guard nodded to McRaven as he passed. Officers are not saluted in combat zones and anyway, McRaven wasn’t wearing the rank devices that marked him as a four-star admiral. As was his custom, he had on a plain set of Navy battle dress utilities. The guard knew him only because of his height and the two shadows that followed him.

Behind the locked hangar doors were four MH-47 Chinooks and a quartet of top secret stealth helicopters. Two of the “black birds” were generation one Stealth Hawk helicopters—their stablemates were a pair of newer, larger, and more sophisticated Ghost Hawks. The stealth helicopters were just four pieces of a complex high-tech package aimed at the leader of Al Qaeda. Never before in the history of U.S. special operations had so much top secret hardware been put at risk in a combat mission.

McRaven continued his walk between the hangars and down an abandoned taxiway. Jalalabad had once been a Soviet air base. The Russians called it “Location 562,” taking the numbers from the airfield’s elevation in meters. From Location 562 the Soviets unleashed helicopter-borne fury against the Mujahideen and the Afghan people. More than two million noncombatants perished during the period of Soviet occupation. The departing Russians didn’t trouble to pick up after themselves. The Jalalabad airfield was littered with the wrecks of Soviet aircraft, the burned out hulks of Mi-8 “Hip” assault helicopters and the sinister, humpbacked shapes of deadly Mi-24 “Hind” gunships. When the Americans moved into the base, they called it “J-bad.” The name seemed to fit.

Stretching his legs, Bill McRaven walked all the way down to where the taxiway met J-bad’s Runway 45 Right. The hangars loomed slate black against a moonless sky. The heat was going rapidly out of the air, but the dust gray tarmac still held its warmth. High above, a few clouds rolled through and the night was increasingly brilliant with stars. McRaven looked up. He
owned
some of the stars that he could see, or at least he controlled them.

Four reconnaissance satellites were positioned in geosynchronous orbit over southern Afghanistan. One took pictures, videos really, in the visible spectrum but also in ultraviolet and infrared. Another satellite relayed communications, a third predicted and reported the weather, and the fourth, a massive piece of equipment the size of a Greyhound bus, did everything that the others did, only better. With these orbiting eyes, Bill McRaven could look from outerspace into a man’s upturned face.

It was the largest satellite, the formidable KH-12 “Keyhole,” that had taken the first high-resolution pictures of the strange, isolated house on the dusty outskirts of Abbottabad. As the evidence mounted that this was the hideout of Osama bin Laden, Keyhole’s massive camera photographed a solitary walker who paced a garden behind a twenty-foot wall. Images from the KH-2 measured Bin Laden’s shadow.

The wind was blowing down from the mountains, a catabatic wind, as predictable in J-bad as the coming of darkness. McRaven listened to the sound of jet engines taxiing at the far end of the tarmac, a mile and half away. The whine turned to a low rumble as the aircraft went to full power for takeoff.

Hurtling down the runway was a low, flat, dark shape. It first looked like a flying wedge, a deconstructionist impression of an airplane, just wings going off by themselves. McRaven watched as the delta-shaped object lumbered down the runway. When it lifted off he could see the white-hot glow of a pair of afterburners framed by titanium thrust vectors. The exhausts were rectangular, and the fire in them made the aircraft look like two lighted house windows climbing into the sky.

This technological wonder was an RQ-170 “Sentinel” drone. Unlike its famous cousins, Predators and Grey Eagles, the Sentinel was unarmed. It defended itself by being invisible to radar and flying faster than any fighter that might lay eyes on it. Still a closely guarded secret, the RQ-170s were only flown at night. For the next six hours, this unmanned supersonic spy plane would circle the city of Abbottabad and provide real-time video and audio uplinks from the SEALs on target. Their crews called the Sentinel “the Beast of Kandahar.” Tonight, in support of Operation Neptune’s Spear, an RQ-170 would use the call sign “Beast,” and its control van and pilots would answer to the apt handle “Beastmaster.” In a moment, the drone had climbed vertically into the darkest part of the sky and vanished.

McRaven walked back to the JOC. Part of the reason he’d taken his walk was to allow the assault element leaders and SEAL Six’s commanding officer Scott Kerr to talk to his Team. The two Red Squadron assault element commanders, Frank Leslie and Rich Horn, would also add their own mission-specific briefings. Mel Hoyle, Red Squadron’s master chief, would inspect the gear of each operator before they were put into “chill”—an hour-long spell for the operators to relax and compose themselves before launch.

The operation had originally been planned for the previous night, April 30, but clouds over the target pushed the mission back twenty-four hours. The delay was tough on a Team that was ready to go, but it added an extra day for Red Squadron to rehearse and Det Alpha to be sure that everything was perfect—racked, stacked, and ready to fly.

In the final hours before the operation, JSOC planners actually worried that the compound in Abbottabad might be a trap. Osama had often stated that he would fight to the death rather than be captured by the United States, and he went so far as to issue instructions to his bodyguard to shoot him if it looked as though he were about to fall into American hands. Analysts wondered why, after ten years of hiding, Al Qaeda’s courier system had become so obvious. Was Ayman Zawahiri burning Osama bin Laden, or was Al Qaeda using their leader as bait to lure American special operations into a clever ambush?

McRaven was surprised when a skeptical JSOC intel analyst first declared that Osama was being set up. Many thought the continued use of Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti as a courier was merely an operational mistake. But Al Qaeda had gone ten years without mistakes. Was this a ruse? Was Al Qaeda planning to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 by blowing a SEAL Team out of the sky?

All of these last-minute doubts stemmed from the odd-looking, three-sided structure on the roof of the compound’s main building. To photo experts, it looked like the firing position for a MANPADS—a man-portable antiaircraft system. A machine gun placed there could sweep the skies above the house. A man with a shoulder-fired missile could destroy any helicopter that got within a mile of the building. It was known that Osama’s bodyguard possessed Soviet-made SA-7s. They had been used in Mombasa against an Israeli airliner. Were they now in Abbottabad?

The possibility that SEAL Team Six was being led into an Al Qaeda trap had been discussed with the assault force. The SEALs considered it an acceptable risk. If it was an ambush, Red Squadron would give as good as they got.

As McRaven walked back toward the command center he could hear the operators joking as they suited up. That was another reason why he went for a walk. The guys were different around him because he was an admiral. He knew they needed space to get ready in their own way for the mission.

SEAL Team Six is one of the most storied units in American military history. And rightly so. The operators of Red Squadron are among the most highly decorated men in the United States military. Many were entering into their seventh or eighth consecutive year of combat service. There are no veterans in American history who have endured more combat. The operators of Team Six are heroes, and their operational credentials allow them to speak freely to the men who lead them into battle.

The price of their obedience is truth.

These men are highly intelligent, well educated, and resourceful. Many of them have graduate degrees. They are well read, and they have a thorough understanding of what is and is not happening in world affairs. The operators of SEAL Team Six put their lives at risk daily for a country they love. They may be forgiven if they have precious little tolerance for leaders who put “table manners” ahead of speaking the truth.

This group can only be led by men who share their values and have undergone the same hardships. Especially respected are those SEAL officers who have themselves sweated through Green Team. A SEAL officer puts his career on the line when he enters a Green Team class. Not all SEAL officers make it. To earn a leadership slot at SEAL Six one must compete against the best SEALs in the business. A lieutenant who is attrited from Green Team can expect to be shunted from one dead-end assignment to another until he either resigns his commission or is forced out of the Teams. The members of SEAL Team Six care very little for what they called “ticket punchers,” officers who back-door their way into JSOC staff assignments without the risk of going through Green Team. Red Squadron, like the other operational entities at Six, is led into combat only by chief petty officers and officers who are Green Team alumni. These men put the concept of Team and Teammate above all other considerations—within Six and outside it.

Bill McRaven knew as well as anyone that it was an honor to command these men, and it was a test of his own skills as a leader. McRaven had been a shooter once himself. He spent the first fifteen years of his SEAL career as a well-respected operator, first as a platoon commander, then as an element leader. He had helped train the SEAL platoons that had operated in Beirut. In the second fifteen years of his career McRaven advanced to captain, commodore, and then rear Admiral. He commanded Task Force 10 during the early part of the Afghan war, distinguishing himself from all his contemporaries. TF-10 hunted Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri over the rough mountains of Afghanistan—and also into the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Once he was at the top, Bill McRaven did not always swim to the rescue of every Teammate who got in over their head, but he continued to look out for the SEAL community and did much to help loosen “Big Army’s” iron grip on JSOC’s command structure. McRaven put SEAL operators into positions of responsibility, and the Army had to get used to the idea of Navy commanders ordering about special operations ground troops hundreds of miles from the ocean in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That wouldn’t have happened in the days of “Demo Dick” Marcinko. During the course of Bill McRaven’s career, the SEAL Teams went from being considered the “Hell’s Angels” of the Navy to being regarded as consummate professionals. He helped make it happen.

But whenever SEALs come into contact with elected officials, it is the fine sense of honor of the SEALs that suffers the embrace. Bill McRaven’s outstanding record in Afghanistan brought him to the attention of the White House, and on April 6, 2011, as the noose was closing around Bin Laden, President Barack Obama appointed William McRaven a four-star admiral and made him the first SEAL to lead the Joint Special Operations Command. Whether he liked it or not, Bill McRaven was a political player. He had accepted both a White House appointment and a tactical assignment from the commander in chief.

It was Sunday, May 1, and Bill McRaven had been at his new job just over three weeks. As darkness fell, he was a few hours away from launching his first combat operation in the capacity of JSOC commander.

If he was nervous, he didn’t show it.

Courage, SEALs learn at BUD/S, is not the absence of fear. The absence of fear in combat is the result of insanity, or an extreme lack of situational awareness. SEALs learn not to ignore fear but to channel it. One of the most popular books at SEAL Team Six is Miyamoto Musashi’s
Book of Five Rings,
a 350-year-old manual for the Samurai that touches on strategy and tactics and how a warrior should comport himself. It teaches that a warrior should be calm, use all his senses, and achieve his goals expending the minimum amount of energy.
The Book of Five Rings
is the cornerstone of the Japanese code of Bushido, the philosophy that is “the Way of the Warrior.” This code includes concepts of law, respect, obedience, duty, and self-sacrifice, qualities that overlap perfectly with the SEAL Teams’ own highly evolved sense of commitment and valor.

One of Musashi’s axioms was posted on a bulletin board in an office in Virginia where Neptune’s Spear was planned. It said: “Know the smallest things and the biggest things, the shallowest things and the deepest things as if they were a straight road mapped out on the ground. From one thing, know ten thousand things. When you attain the way of strategy there will be nothing you cannot see.”

Admiral Bill McRaven knew that his plan was solid.

The CIA made sure that Red Squadron knew everything about the mission that was possible to know.

A forensics lab with state-of-the-art DNA analysis equipment had been set up in one of the hangars—in the event the operation went south, it would be used as a morgue for SEALs killed in action. High above Abbottabad, the Sentinel had started to send back video of the compound. The one hundred technicians and intelligence specialists that supported Red Squadron had done their best to make sure the operation went off and that all of Neptune’s equipment functioned as it should.

Bill McRaven was a student of history. He had written a book on special operations and had studied the subject all his adult life. Now it was his turn—not to write about history, but to make it.

*   *   *

Not even Abraham Lincoln could resist the temptation of interfering with the plans of his generals. No sooner had Red Squadron deployed to Afghanistan than the White House began to fiddle with the plan. Fearing an aerial confrontation with the Pakistani air force, the White House first canceled plans for F-18 Hornet fighters from the carrier USS
Carl Vinson
to fly combat air patrol over the helicopters inserting SEAL Team Six into Pakistan.

It is a very small thing for a man in the calm quiet of a map room five thousand miles from the battlefield to cancel air cover for a ground operation. It is quite another experience for the men who have to traverse 120 miles of potentially hostile airspace and do so in a pair of unarmed helicopters.