No Easy Day Read online

  The tile stairs were set at ninety-degree angles, creating a sort of spiral staircase separated by small landings. We had no idea what to expect. By now, Bin Laden or whoever was hiding inside had plenty of time to get a weapon and prepare a defense. Since the only way up was through a spiraling staircase, we could easily get bottlenecked.

  It was dark and we were doing our best to be quiet. Every step was deliberate.

  No talking.

  No yelling.

  No running.

  In the old days, we’d storm the castle, throwing flash grenades as we cleared through an objective. Now we stayed as quiet as possible. We had the advantage with our night vision, but it would be lost if you went barreling into a room. It was all about throttle control. There was no reason to run to our deaths.

  When I reached the landing on the second deck, most of the other assaulters had fanned out. The second floor opened into a long hallway heading to a terrace that ran along the south side of the building. The floor had four doors, two right near the landing and two farther down near the terrace. I could see my teammates creeping down the hall, stacking on the doors before quietly clearing inside.

  I noticed another assaulter three or four steps up the stairs holding security on the landing between the second and third decks. A body was on the landing. Blood was trickling out onto the marble floor.

  While holding security, the assaulter had seen a man quickly poke his head down around the landing. Intelligence reports said there could be up to four males living at the compound. Khalid, one of Bin Laden’s sons, was most likely living on the second floor, while Bin Laden lived on the third floor.

  The head peeking around the corner was clean-cut with no beard. It had to be Bin Laden’s son.

  “Khalid,” the assaulter whispered. “Khalid.”

  Everyone in the compound had heard the helicopter engines. They heard the shots fired at the guesthouse, and they heard the explosive breaches.

  But by then everything was quiet again. All they could hear was our footsteps. Then the man on the landing heard his name being called.

  They know my name? I imagine him thinking.

  Curiosity got the best of him and he stuck his head out to see who was calling his name. The second he stuck his head back around the corner, the assaulter shot him in the face. His body rolled down the stairs and rested on the landing.

  Looking back, I saw we had several more SEALs coming up the stairs and beginning to stack behind me. The second-floor hallway was already full of assaulters and they didn’t need any more help.

  The only place to go was up.

  Standing behind the point man, I gave him a squeeze to let him know we were ready.

  “Take it.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Third Deck

  Khalid was splayed out on his back, and we had to carefully pick our way past him on the stairs.

  The steps were slick tile, made slicker by the blood. Each step was precarious. Nearby, I saw Khalid’s AK-47 rifle propped on the step.

  “I am glad he didn’t man up and use that thing,” I thought.

  Had the point man not called his name, we could have been pinned down on the stairwell. All he had to do was sit on the landing and fire a few rounds each time we tried to move up the stairs toward his position. That would have been a nightmare, and we would have taken some casualties for sure.

  We had planned for more of a fight. For all the talk about suicide vests and being willing to shed blood for Allah, only one of the al-Kuwaiti brothers got off a barrage. At least Khalid had thought about it. When we examined his AK-47 later, we learned he had a round in the chamber. He was prepared to fight, but in the end, he hadn’t gotten much of an opportunity.

  The stairwell was pitch-black to the naked eye, but under our night vision everything was bathed in a green hue. The assaulter holding security was now on point as we followed him up the stairs. We were again slowing down and taking our time. The point man was the eyes and ears for the rest of us. He controlled the pace.

  Throttle on. Throttle off.

  So far, everything was adding up. We knew the house had at least four men. The only one left was Bin Laden. But I pushed those thoughts out of my head. It didn’t matter who it was on the third deck. We were possibly walking into a gunfight, and most gunfights at this range only last a few seconds. There was no margin of error.

  “Focus,” I told myself.

  With the point man directly in front of me, there was nothing much I could do. I was there to support him. Roughly fifteen minutes had passed and Bin Laden had plenty of time to strap on a suicide vest or simply get his gun.

  My eyes scanned the landing up ahead. My senses were on overdrive. My ears strained to hear a round being chambered or the footsteps of someone approaching. Nothing we were doing was new. We had all been on hundreds of missions. At the most basic level, we were clearing rooms like we learned in Green Team. Only the target and the fact that we were in Pakistan made this mission significant.

  The landing at the top of the stairs opened into a narrow hallway. At the end of the hall was a door to the balcony. Roughly five feet from the top of the stairs were two doors, one to the right and one to the left.

  The stairway was relatively narrow, especially for a bunch of guys in kit. It was difficult to see around the point man, since the stairwell and landing narrowed as we got to the top.

  We were less than five steps from getting to the top when I heard suppressed shots.

  BOP. BOP.

  The point man had seen a man peeking out of the door on the right side of the hallway about ten feet in front of him. I couldn’t tell from my position if the rounds hit the target or not. The man disappeared into the dark room.

  The point man reached the landing first and slowly moved toward the door. Unlike in the movies, we didn’t bound up the final few steps and rush into the room with guns blazing. We took our time.

  The point man kept his rifle trained into the room as we slowly crept toward the open door. Again, we didn’t rush. Instead, we waited at the threshold and peered inside. We could see two women standing over a man lying at the foot of a bed. Both women were dressed in long gowns and their hair was a tangled mess like they had been sleeping. The women were hysterically crying and wailing in Arabic. The younger one looked up and saw us at the door.

  She yelled out in Arabic and rushed the point man. We were less than five feet apart. Swinging his gun to the side, the point man grabbed both women and drove them toward the corner of the room. If either woman had on a suicide vest, he probably saved our lives, but it would have cost him his own. It was a selfless decision made in a split second.

  With the women out of the way, I entered the room with a third SEAL. We saw the man lying on the floor at the foot of his bed. He was wearing a white sleeveless T-shirt, loose tan pants, and a tan tunic. The point man’s shots had entered the right side of his head. Blood and brains spilled out of the side of his skull. In his death throes, he was still twitching and convulsing. Another assaulter and I trained our lasers on his chest and fired several rounds. The bullets tore into him, slamming his body into the floor until he was motionless.

  Quickly scanning for additional threats, I saw at least three children huddled in the far corner of the room near the sliding glass door that opened onto the balcony. The children—I couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls—sat in the corner, stunned, as I cleared the room.

  With the man on the floor now motionless and no further threat, we cleared two small rooms just off the bedroom. Pushing the first door open, I peeked inside and saw a small, cramped, messy office. Papers were strewn all over a tiny desk. The second door revealed a small shower and toilet.

  Everything was muscle memory now. In our minds, we started ticking off our mental checklist. The main threat was dead by the bed. The point man was covering the women and kids. My teammate and I cleared the small office and bathroom, while the other SEALs cleared the room across the hall.
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  As I went across the hall to the other room, I passed Walt on the way.

  “All clear over here,” he said.

  “This side too,” I replied.

  The point man moved the women and kids out of the bedroom and onto the balcony to keep them calm. Tom was on the third deck and saw that both rooms were clear.

  “Third deck secure,” I heard him say over the troop net.

  CHAPTER 16

  Geronimo

  Back in the bedroom, the youngest woman was lying on the bed, screaming hysterically, clutching her calf.

  Walt was standing next to the body. It was still dark and it was hard to make out the man’s face. The house was still without power. I reached up and flipped on the light clipped into the rail system on my helmet. The target was now secure and since all the windows were covered, no one could see us from the outside, so the use of white light was safe.

  The man’s face was mangled from at least one bullet wound and covered in blood. A hole in his forehead collapsed the right side of his skull. His chest was torn up from where the bullets had entered his body. He was lying in an ever-growing pool of blood. As I crouched down to take a closer look, Tom joined me.

  “I think this is our boy,” Tom said.

  He wasn’t about to say it was Bin Laden over the radio because he knew that call would be shot like lightning back to Washington. We knew President Obama was listening, so we didn’t want to be wrong.

  I went through the checklist in my head.

  He was very tall. I figured approximately six foot four inches.

  Check.

  He was the one adult male on the third deck.

  Check.

  The two couriers were exactly where the CIA said they’d be.

  Check.

  The more I looked at his mangled face, my eye seemed to go back to his nose. It wasn’t damaged and seemed familiar. Pulling my booklet out of my kit, I studied the composite photos. The long and slender nose fit. His beard was dark black and there was no trace of the gray that I expected to see.

  “Walt and I will run with this,” I said to Tom.

  “Roger,” Tom said.

  Taking out my camera and rubber gloves, I started taking photos while Walt prepared to take multiple sets of DNA samples.

  Will, the Arabic speaker, was in the room treating the leg wound of the woman crying on the bed. We learned later that she was Amal al-Fatah, Bin Laden’s fifth wife. I’m not sure when she got hit, but it was a very small wound. It could have been from bullet fragments or a ricochet.

  “Hey, we have a significant amount of SSE on the second deck,” I heard someone call over the troop net. “We’re going to need any extra bodies down here.”

  As Tom left the room, I heard him on the command net.

  “We have a possible, I repeat POSSIBLE touchdown on the third deck.”

  Walt pulled his CamelBak hose from his kit and squirted water on the man’s face.

  I started to wipe the blood away from his face using a blanket from the bed. With each swipe, the face became more familiar. He looked younger than I expected. His beard was dark, like it had been dyed. I just kept thinking about how he didn’t look anything like I’d expected him to look.

  It was strange to see such an infamous face up close. Lying in front of me was the reason we had been fighting for the last decade. It was surreal trying to clean blood off the most wanted man in the world so that I could shoot his photo. I had to focus on the mission. Right now, we needed some good quality photos. This picture could end up being widely viewed, and I didn’t want to mess it up.

  Tossing the blanket away, I pulled out the camera that I’d used to shoot hundreds of pictures over the last few years and started snapping photos. We’d all gotten real good taking these kinds of photos. We’d been playing CSI Afghanistan for years.

  The first shots were of his full body. Then I knelt down near his head and shot a few of just his face. Pulling his beard to the right and then the left, I shot several profile pictures. I really wanted to focus on the nose. Because the beard was so dark, the profile shot was the one that really stood out in my mind.

  “Hey, man, hold his good eye open,” I said to Walt.

  He reached down and peeled back the eyelid, exposing his now lifeless brown eye. I zoomed in and shot a tight photo of it. While I shot pictures, Will was with the women and children on the balcony. Below us, my teammates were collecting all of the computers, memory cards, notebooks, and videos. Outside, Ali, the CIA interpreter, and the security team were dealing with curious neighbors.

  Over the radio, I heard Mike talking about the crashed Black Hawk.

  “Demo team, prep it to blow,” Mike said.

  I knew from the radio traffic that the SEAL in charge of demolition and the EOD tech were on their way to the courtyard.

  “Hey, we’re going to blow it,” the SEAL said.

  “Roger that,” the EOD tech said. He started taking out charges and putting them around the ground floor of the main house.

  “What the fuck?” the SEAL said as the EOD tech unpacked.

  Everybody was confused.

  “You told me to get ready to blow it, right?”

  “Not the house,” the SEAL said. “The helo.”

  “What helo?”

  The EOD tech thought the SEAL meant they were going to blow the house, which was another one of the contingency plans we had trained for.

  News of Chalk One’s crash was still not widespread. People were just finding out about it. In Washington, they weren’t even sure we’d crashed when they watched it on the drone feed. I heard later it looked on the grainy black-and-white video as if we’d “parked” in the courtyard and let the team out. The president and senior staff were confused when it happened, and even asked JSOC what was going on. A quick message to McRaven came back with an answer: “We will now be amending the mission… we have a helicopter down in the courtyard. My men are prepared for this contingency, and they will deal with it.”

  Outside, the helicopter crew was done destroying all of the classified gear. Teddy, the senior pilot and flight lead, was one of the last to climb out. Getting to the door, he looked at the almost six-foot drop to the ground. There was no way he wanted to jump and risk injury. Kicking the fast rope out of the cabin, he slid down to the courtyard, which made him the only guy to fast-rope into the compound that night.

  The EOD tech and the SEAL got there soon after and started to place explosive charges around the fuselage. Climbing up the tail, the SEAL tried to get charges as close to the tail rotors as possible. Wearing his kit and night vision goggles wasn’t the easiest way to climb up the unstable, narrow section of tail boom. Each time he tried to reach the section propped on the twelve-foot wall, he was afraid it would break under his weight.

  Climbing up as high as he could, he placed the charges with one hand. The other hand kept him stable as he balanced precariously over the courtyard. Destroying the communications equipment and avionics was the most important part. With the charges set on the tail, he placed the remaining charges in the main cabin.

  Meanwhile, the Black Hawk that hadn’t crashed and the CH-47 carrying the QRF were flying in circles nearby, waiting for us to finish. Fuel was becoming an issue, which meant our time in the compound was shrinking quickly.

  “Ten minutes,” I heard Mike say over the radio.

  On the third deck, the lights in the room came on, bathing us in the glow of white light. The rolling blackout was apparently over. It was perfect timing and made everything easier.

  While I continued shooting pictures, Walt took DNA samples. He dabbed a cotton swab in Bin Laden’s blood. He took another and jammed it in Bin Laden’s mouth to get a saliva sample. Finally, he took out a spring-loaded syringe the CIA gave us to get a blood-marrow sample. We’d been trained to jab it into the thigh to get a sample from inside the femur. Walt jabbed it several times into Bin Laden’s thigh, but the needle wouldn’t fire.

  “Here,�
� I said, handing him mine. “Try this one.”

  He took it and slammed my syringe into the fleshy part of Bin Laden’s thigh, but it also didn’t fire.

  “Fuck these things,” Walt said, tossing the syringes to the side.

  I finished taking a second set of pictures using another SEAL’s camera. We took two DNA samples and sets of photos so that we had identical sets. Walt put one sample in his cargo pocket and gave another to a SEAL in the other chalk. This had been carefully planned so if one of the helicopters was shot down on our flight back to Jalalabad, a DNA sample and set of pictures would survive. We wanted proof to show to Pakistan and the rest of the world we got Bin Laden.

  Meanwhile, on the balcony, Will was trying to get confirmation that it was Bin Laden on the floor.

  Bin Laden’s wife Amal, who had been wounded in the ankle, was still hysterical and wouldn’t talk. I could hear her whimpering on the bed above me while I worked. The other woman, her eyes puffy from crying, tried to keep a stern face as Will asked her over and over again in Arabic who the dead guy was.

  “What is his name?”

  “The sheikh,” the woman said.

  “The sheikh who?” Will said. He didn’t want to lead her and stuck to open-ended questions.

  After she gave Will several aliases, he went over to the kids who were outside on the balcony. They were all sitting silently against the wall. Will knelt down and asked one of the girls, “Who is the man?”

  The girl didn’t know to lie.

  “Osama bin Laden.”

  Will smiled.

  “Are you sure that is Osama bin Laden?”

  “Yes,” the girl said.

  “OK,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Back in the hallway, he grabbed one of the wives by her arms and gave her a good shake.

  “Stop fucking with me now,” Will said, more sternly than before. “Who is that in the bedroom?”

  She started to cry. More scared than anything else, she didn’t have any fight left.

  “Osama,” she said.