Hunt the Jackal

SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Falcon

SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Scorpion

SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Wolf

Inside SEAL Team Six: My Life and Missions with America’s Elite Warriors

F
orty-two-year-old
Lisa Clark sat in the pearl-white Jacuzzi spa bath with the red monoliths of Sedona shining through the floor-to-ceiling window, reading
Fifty Shades of Grey
. Sandalwood candles burned on the rough slate border as she reached for the glass of La Crema Russian River Valley Chardonnay. A senator’s wife and mother of two children who worked hard to maintain her long dancer’s body, she was indulging in a rare moment of relaxation and guilty pleasure. Usually she wore her hair pulled back or tied in a French braid, but now she wore it loose to her shoulders.

As she read, real guilt started to spread through her body. The relationship between college student Ana and überbusinessman Christian Grey brought back memories of her own one-year affair with a worldly restaurant owner she met while working as a waitress in Washington, D.C.

Twenty-four years ago she was a tall, blond, fresh-faced eighteen-year-old girl from the little town of Boykins, Virginia, perky in every way, taking courses at American U when she met Henri Gaudier. The world-famous chef-restaurateur represented everything she thought she wanted—worldliness, sophistication, and high-society status among a network of rich and powerful friends. Her sole claim to fame at the time was having placed as runner-up in the Miss Southampton High beauty pageant. Unlike the character of Ana in the book, Lisa wasn’t a virgin when they met—but at least she was uninitiated to hard drugs, S&M, and group sex.

Henri quickly changed that. He also introduced her to senators, generals, cabinet members, sports stars, mobsters, movie stars, and other celebrities. Along the way she learned that sex and drugs formed a dark, illicit river that many famous and highly esteemed people in Washington waded into when they thought they were safe.

For the past twenty-three years, since the night she met Jesse Abrams Clark at a Bastille Day party at the French embassy in Washington, she had tried her best to erase the interlude with Henri from her memory. Clark was a young navy lieutenant working as an aide at the White House then. Now he was the senior Republican senator from Virginia, but still straightlaced, aggressive, self-confident, and solidly Christian.

She’d never told him about the wild, sexually adventurous year she’d spent with Henri, or her cocaine habit, or the night it ended. She had never fessed up to anyone, including herself, how her time with Henri had affected her and made her wary of losing control.

She considered that now as warm sandalwood-scented water churned around her, softening her skin and relaxing her muscles. The past was a burden, and being a senator’s wife wasn’t easy, despite its many rewards. Maybe that explained the weariness and ennui she’d been experiencing lately. In addition to the several weekly appearances she was required to make with her husband on the Washington social circuit, she had to attend political and charity events and run two households—one in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia. She also served as her husband’s cheerleader and political advisor.

Together they had two children, whose upbringing was primarily her responsibility. Fifteen-year-old Jesse Abrams Clark, Jr., was the apple of Lisa’s eye. Jesse Jr. was not only handsome and athletic, with a magical smile, but he and she had had a natural rapport from the day he was born.

Seventeen-year-old Olivia was more like her father—strong-willed and reserved. She was tall and blond and had her father’s strong jaw and steady blue eyes. Olivia was always respectful to her mother, but Lisa hadn’t felt close to her since Olivia entered puberty and started directing most of her attention to horseback riding and the Presbyterian Church.

Lisa had planned this trip to Sedona, Arizona, as an opportunity for the two of them to spend time together before Olivia entered Duke University in the fall.

Now her daughter sat in the adjoining bedroom of the Enchantment Resort
casita
ostensibly studying the Bible, but really posting pictures on Facebook of herself and her mom standing outside the
casita
in their climbing apparel.

As Lisa read further, lascivious memories rose to the surface of her consciousness and burst like bubbles. One of them involved a cocaine-fueled night with Henri and an NFL star in Henri’s suite at the Watergate Hotel. One moment they were laughing and drinking champagne with dinner, the next she was naked on Henri’s king-sized bed with her ankles and wrists tied to the bedposts.

She quickly stopped and put down the book. Almost simultaneously, the chimes rang at the front door of the
casita
. Craning her long neck toward the iPhone on the counter, Lisa saw that it was 6:13 p.m. One of the maids had probably come to turn down the beds, or maybe Olivia had requested something from room service.

She thought about the dinner reservation she had made for seven thirty and what she wanted to wear. In the background she heard footsteps and muffled voices.

“Olivia,” she called, her voice bouncing off the tile floor. “Darling.”

Deciding to call the concierge to ask him to send someone to wash and blow out her hair, she stood and started to reach for the courtesy phone on the wall.

Just then the door opened and a young Hispanic woman appeared in the doorway.

She was dressed in black pants and a white polo and wore a silver crucifix around her neck. “Good evening,
Señora,
” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Lisa answered, covering her breasts with her left arm. “Did my daughter call you?”

“No,
Señora,
” the girl responded, moving her right arm in front of her; it held a dark pistol equipped with a silencer. “But if you step out of there and come with me, there won’t be a problem.”

Coldness spread through Lisa’s body. She couldn’t imagine this was anything more than a routine robbery, or that the girl, who seemed to be no more than sixteen, was capable of real violence. She turned and started to reach again for the phone.

The girl stepped forward quickly, slapped Lisa’s hand away, and aimed the pistol at her head. “You make one sound and I’ll shoot you!”

Lisa nodded and swallowed hard. Blood burned her temples, and her knees shook. She remembered Olivia in the next room and hoped she’d run or called for help.

Two young men stepped inside the bathroom dressed in matching white polo shirts and black pants. They also looked like teenagers—smart and alert and with silver crucifixes around their necks.

One of them—a boy with black hair and a scar across his lip—held something over Lisa’s nose and mouth. She inhaled the smell of chloroform as she heard the boy say, “We’re here,
Señora
, in the name of La Santísima Muerte. She wants you to come with us.”

Her legs started to melt. The two men held her naked body and lifted her out of the water. She felt a tingle between her legs, then lost consciousness.

SEAL Team Six (a.k.a. DEVGRU) Chief Warrant Officer Tom Crocker held on to the overhead bar that stretched between the twin side doors of the Black Hawk as the helicopter banked right over parched terrain in northwest Syria. The helo was hit by a headwind, which jerked it sharply right and kicked up a big cloud of dust.

“Hold on,” he shouted to his teammates behind him. The darkening sky ahead turned eerie shades of orange and purple.

Like a bruise
, he said to himself. The whole country was more like an open wound now, with over seventy thousand civilian dead and a strange alliance of Sunni rebels and terrorists, including the al-Qaeda–linked Al Nusrah, pitted against the repressive and stubborn Assad regime, supported by Iran, Russia, China, and Hezbollah.

Crocker didn’t really give a shit about the regional politics, or the civil war in Syria. He was here with his team to complete a specific mission, which in this case involved a downed MQ-1B Predator drone. He was scanning the landscape for it now as his men—Cal, Ritchie, Mancini, Akil, and Davis—discussed Ritchie’s upcoming bachelor party and wedding in the tilt-up seats as though they were back at ST-6 command or hanging at their favorite watering hole in Virginia Beach.

“I’m talking crazier than a Mötley Crüe binge,” Ritchie shouted over the engines. “A final blowout tribute to the end of my bachelor days.”

“I saw them perform in El Paso in ’02. One of the wildest shows I’ve ever seen,” Davis commented, which was somewhat surprising since he was the mildest, most soft-spoken guy on the team.

“You into Mötley Crüe?” Ritchie asked.

“I wouldn’t say I’m into them,” Davis replied, screaming over the engine and rotors. “I mean, I don’t have any of their tunes on my iPod. I’m just saying they put on a hell of a show.”

“Like we give a shit,” Akil shouted back. He was the team’s muscular Egyptian American logistics expert, and the lone bachelor, except for the Asian American sniper, Cal, who almost never spoke. “Let’s hear more about the bachelor party.”

“What?” Ritchie asked as the helicopter passed over the ruins of a stone structure that looked like it was centuries old.

“The bachelor party!”

“It’s gonna be so wild I’m gonna have you guys sign nondisclosure forms,” Ritchie boasted.

“Me, I’m not signing shit,” Akil growled.

Davis: “I might have to pass.”

“Your loss,” Ritchie replied, grinning from ear to ear and lighting up his roughly handsome face. Immediately likeable, with a big smile and high cheekbones, he resembled the ballplayer Johnny Damon. “Dude, I gotta swear you guys to secrecy,” he continued, “because there’s gonna be some wild shit going down, which I’m definitely partaking in. Monica can’t find out.”

Monica was his bride-to-be—a former swimsuit model and now a successful real estate developer with a killer body and expensive tastes. Crocker thought she might be out of Ritchie’s league in terms of ambition and sophistication, but he kept that to himself.

“Rich, you might not want to hear this now, but as your friend I gotta tell you: Honesty is the bedrock of marriage,” Davis shouted. He had young kids and a pretty wife and had put his wild motorcycle-riding past behind him.

“Thanks, Reverend Holier-Than-Thou Dickhead,” Ritchie shot back. “I’ll work on that…after I tie the knot.”

“You gonna have strippers?” Cal asked, holding a PSG-1 sniper rifle across his lap.

Akil turned to him and said, “Look who’s interested in strippers.”

“With special skills, man. And that’s just the start,” Ritchie answered.

Akil: “When? Where? Count me in!”

Mancini wasn’t interested in the bachelor party or the locker room banter. This was men’s work, given that they were operating in someone else’s country without permission and both Syrian Army and Hezbollah units had been spotted in the vicinity, neither of which were likely to greet them with handshakes and pats on the back. Searching the rough terrain with Steiner Commander military binoculars from the door opposite Crocker, he spotted something white against the black backdrop.

Leaning into the fuselage, he yelled, “I see something, boss. Target at nine o’clock!”

Crocker took a couple of steps toward Mancini, leaned out the door, and spotted the drone, which looked like a crumpled toy.

Cupping his hands together, he shouted at the pilot, then pointed. “The target’s on our left!”

The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) pilot turned and nodded back, his wide face covered with reddish stubble. When he banked the helo over a parched wadi and some dried scrub, the MQ-1B Predator drone came into view, its wide nose pointing up like a sea lion lounging on a rock.

For some technical reason unclear to Crocker, it hadn’t self-destructed on impact like it was programmed to do. Black Cell’s job was to blow it up before the Syrian Army or their Hezbollah/Iranian partners got their dirty paws on it and purloined the advanced technical doodads and three AGM-114 Hellfire missiles.

Black Cell was a badass special compartmentalized cell at SEAL Team Six—designed to conduct the most dangerous, top secret counterterrorism missions on direct orders from the White House and CIA.

Minus the front antenna and intact, the drone measured twenty-seven feet long and had a wingspan over fifty-five feet. The whole thing weighed 1,130 pounds. Crocker had watched one being unloaded from a C-150 Hercules in a box called a coffin and assembled in three sections.

He didn’t have the patience for highly detailed, tight little tasks like that and preferred roaming, canoeing, riding, or running in the outdoors in his spare time. Even putting together bookcases from IKEA drove him nuts.

The Black Hawk hovered about eighty feet over the site, which was the best the pilot could do, given the wind, sand, and dust. Not the ideal platform to launch from, but in their line of work conditions were rarely perfect.

Crocker gave the thumbs-up and pointed to the ground. The guys readied their gear and weapons, and Mancini and Akil dropped two special braided nylon ropes out the left door that were anchored to a hoist in the helo.

Davis and Akil fast-roped first, grabbing on to the rope with two leather-gloved hands, then stepping out of the helicopter and pinching the rope between their Salomon Quest boots to regulate their descending speed. It was like sliding down a fire pole, only a whole lot riskier. Black Cell had practiced fast-roping so many times it was as automatic as tying the laces on their shoes.

Light was right, in this case because they wanted to move quickly in and out, and a heavy load would make roping down from that height a hell of a lot more perilous than it was already, given the wind and dust. Which was why Crocker decided to stop Ritchie and Cal before they went out the door. Unlike the others, they wore big packs loaded with C-4, detonators, and other explosives gear.

“You guys wait on the bird,” Crocker yelled. “We’ll secure the site and help you unload once it lands.”

“Piece of cake,” Ritchie shouted back, pointing to the ground.

“No, Rich. You and Cal wait here!” Crocker commanded.