The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (32 page)

Cassidy clicked off again to alert the platoon, knowing that I’d be back on comms in a moment.

Now I briefed the helo crew. Up to this point these guys knew nothing whatsoever about Alpha-117. As far as our intel went they were on a need-to-know basis, meaning I wouldn’t pass on any information unless something happened. Well, something was happening. We were ready to get it on, and it was time to read them in on the situation. I keyed up my ICS (internal communications system) mike.

“Guys, here’s the situation. We have a terrorist-sponsored vessel dead ahead. These are serious bad guys on board, and are most likely armed. This is the real deal. Time to go to work.”

I heard a murmured “Holy shit” from the pilot. My thoughts exactly.

This was a much different situation than taking down a bunch of smugglers. Typically Navy helo crews do not see much in the way of combat action. Don’t get me wrong. They have a tough job, and flying over these hostile waters in the dead of night at a bare few hundred feet off the surface is no joke. There’s no putting down on land and walking away from the mission on one of these maritime interdictions. As I had nearly experienced myself years earlier during maneuvers over these same waters under the “leadership” of Lieutenant Burkitt, that bird can easily be in the drink and upside down in seconds, taking its crew straight down to a briny grave. There was no margin for error here, and these guys were good—but they hadn’t been in this type of situation before, and they were clearly nervous. We were going in to take down a hostile terrorist ship, and if those characters saw us coming they wouldn’t be welding themselves in and waiting to see what we did. There were weapons on that boat for a reason. They’d use them on us.

I went back to Cassidy and started feeding him the information he needed to mount our silent attack. In this instant his concerns were pure physics and logistics.
How do we get on board fast and clean? What class of ship is it? Where’s the superstructure located—midship? foreship? aft? What’s the ideal point on the ship to board? How long will it take the team to scale and board—how many feet of freeboard are we looking at?

In an operation like this, stealth and accuracy are everything. Unless you want to have the other guy’s arsenal start unloading in your direction, you need to strike with the speed and accuracy of a snake. This is the quintessential sniper’s task: instantaneous calculation, integration, and delivery of critical information, complete and with 100 percent accuracy.

I emptied my mind and focused my faculties like a laser sight. Right now I had to function as a precision instrument for surveillance and calculation. I started passing Cassidy the data he needed.

“Hull length 300 feet. Vessel speed, 18 knots. Twenty feet of freeboard…”

Eighteen knots is about 20 mph. Freeboard is the vertical distance from the water line to the hook point on the edge of the rail. Twenty feet is a pretty high freeboard, meaning there was a significant vertical distance to travel in order to put the team on board. This boarding would have to be surgically precise.

“Superstructure’s aft, with direct access to the bridge. I’d say hook on aft. Nobody on deck—looks like we can double-hook.”

This was good. If we could get two simultaneous hooks going, we could send two teams up and over at the same time, one on each side of the ship.

Cassidy spoke quietly into his comm, briefing the team. They hopped into two RHIBs—rigid-hulled inflatable boats. The RHIB is a very fast craft, with twin diesel engines delivering 1,000 horsepower. You come up alongside the ship, matching its speed, and pin your RHIB right up against the hull. This is a precision stunt, something like pulling up in a Hummer next to a bus going 60 mph on a highway and maintaining your position in perfect tandem while eight guys step over you and board the bus in full gear. One simple misstep can screw it up, and here that would have lethal consequences.

Now I communicated to the pilots our optimum standoff distance, and the choreography began. I had to be careful not to put the helo on scene too soon, because if the crew on the tanker was alerted by the sound of the approaching helo, we would lose the crucial element of surprise. I had to time it to the split second and coordinate the procedure precisely with the platoon on the water and pilots up front in the helo. Training, training.

Just as the RHIB teams reached the ship, port and starboard, we slipped the bird into position on the tanker’s port flank, hovering 150 feet off the surface. Our helo was completely blacked out. I was on night vision with the door still open, staring out into the black, silent scene below me.

Now we swung into the diciest part of the operation.

Up to this point I’d been giving Cassidy the playbook on how to board the ship. Now my role slipped into its most acute phase, because I had to deliver a stream of real-time intel as the situation began to unfold. If I saw someone emerging from below, from the wheelhouse, the engine room, or any other area of the ship, I’d need to let the right person on the team know instantly—“I’ve got a guy coming out of midship on the port side, heading your way”—so they’d know what they were dealing with.

And it was not all a matter of pure reconnaissance. I was, after all, a sniper. If a serious threat showed up, I was there to take it out.

It all happened fast.

In movies you see assault teams swarming over boats or buildings with someone in charge shouting “Go, go, go, go,
go
!” But this was not Hollywood, and in the waters off Iraq at midnight the assault sequence played out in a surreal silence, broken only by momentary brief murmurs into comms as critical bytes of information were passed on. From point man to breacher, every member of the team knew exactly what he had to do.

As I scanned the tanker’s deck for signs of discovery, one of our guys in the portside RHIB swung up a tall carbon fiber pole. Atop the pole sat a surgical tube quick-release mechanism attached to a titanium double hook, in turn attached to a narrow titanium caving ladder, some ten inches wide. The pole hooked the rail and popped off the quick release, and the ladder was in position. The same operation was happening in simultaneous mirror image starboardside. On each side of the vessel, while the designated ladder man held tension on the ladder, the other guys scurried up the 20 feet of freeboard, over the rail, and onto the ship’s deck.

This was a delicate step. I vividly remembered an event that had occurred a few years ago off the surly California coast during our eighteen months of training workup. As we had gone through exactly this type of operation, Shawn, our breacher, scuttled up a caving ladder outfitted with his acetylene torch and 60-pound tank. Some rookie was at the helm of the RHIB and accelerated too fast. The ladder suddenly snapped taut and twanged hard, sending Shawn, off and into the drink. Loaded with torch, full gear, and body armor, he sank a full 30 feet before he was able to shuck off enough equipment to start fighting his way back up to the surface.

It was a damn good thing this had happened to us in training. Because it had happened then, it didn’t happen now, and the operation went off like a precision electronic instrument. As the members of the assault team scrambled up the narrow ladders and slipped silently over the rails, I sat up in the helo, peering out the open door, scanning the length of the terrorist boat, scrutinizing the scene through my night-vision goggles for the slightest trace of movement.

There was no one on deck. We had caught them completely off guard.

I watched as one team headed for the wheelhouse and another peeled off to head below for aft steering. In moments the ship would be effectively taken over—if all went well. And it had to go well. Once you go internal the risk escalates, because in a firefight you can get ricochets.

Suddenly I saw a searing flash of light, nearly blinding in the pitch black. Explosively bright bursts of light streamed out through the wheelhouse windows, accompanied by sharp reports.

The helo pilot yanked on his stick, pulling us off station, ready to bank and haul ass out of there. I knew what he was thinking:
We’re taking fire!

“Hold station!” I barked at him as the bird jerked hard left, nearly tossing me out the door. “No—don’t worry!”

It
looked
like hostile fire, especially on night vision—but it wasn’t. Our guys were just using standard hostile room-entry tactics, using flashbangs, a type of grenade simulator SEALs employ in operations like this. The flashbang is an effective (albeit somewhat dangerous) stun grenade. You crack open the door and roll this baby into the room, it goes off with a loud
crash
and burst of light, and everyone in the room is momentarily stunned and blinded, giving you a few seconds to move in and take them.

Our helo pilot put the bird steady back on course, and we watched the scene unfold below.
Crash! Crash!
Cabin after cabin they fanned out, scattering their explosive seeds and harvesting each roomful of stunned prisoners, clearing and securing area after area.

Without firing a shot, our guys had taken the ship.

One group immediately started a reclear, methodically going back through the entire vessel, room by room, making sure there were no stragglers. I heard it all happening over my comm. One of our guys had grabbed the hat off the ship’s captain’s head and now wore it himself. He lit up a cigar he must have found on the ship (the thing was loaded with illegal smokes) and started running from cabin to cabin reclearing the vessel, El Capitán’s chapeau perched on his cranium, chomping on his cigar and brandishing his M-4. Jesus, what a character.

Meanwhile, the rest of the crew were hauling our prisoners out onto the aft deck, about thirty of them in all. Typically guys captured in a slam-bang operation like this will be so frightened they will be pretty submissive at this point, but occasionally you’ll get someone who decides to go aggressive. An incident like that had occurred back in 1999, when a guy from SEAL Team Three got into a scuffle with one of his team’s prisoners. His weapon went off and he took a round in the leg. Another SEAL patched him up. (No doc. Ouch.) Since then we’d started wearing weapons catches; we would slip our primary weapon to the side and into the catch so it would be fixed and not go flopping around (as had happened with Gilroy Jones on my first day with ECHO platoon).

I could see there were some pretty belligerent characters here, and our guys appeared to be giving them some tough love.

“Hey,” I said to the sensor operator, “move the FLIR forward of the superstructure.”
And let these guys do their job
, I added to myself. The image on the FLIR was being streamed back to the command post on the destroyer, and I wanted to keep these guys out of trouble. There was no outright abuse or wrongful conduct happening here, but our guys would do whatever it took to contain this situation fast and hard. This was not a time for waffling or second-guessing.

In a few hours we would be turning the boat over to a Maritime Interdiction Force, a specially trained navy crew who would steer it down to a holding area off the coast of Dubai, where it would be turned over to one of the alphabet-soup intelligence agencies. From that point on we would never know what happened or exactly what these characters were up to. But it didn’t take a high-level clearance to see that they were up to something big—and not good.

All told, we’d taken about thirty prisoners, a bunch of fake passports, over a hundred grand in U.S. dollars, and a
lot
of weapons. From start to finish, we pulled off this high-threat takedown in about five minutes, with maybe another ten to comb the ship and make sure everything and everyone was accounted for.

It was a textbook boarding.

*   *   *

In late November, not long after that successful nighttime op in the Gulf, about half our platoon was flown down to stage on Masirah Island off the coast of Oman, to the southeast of the United Arab Emirates and the easternmost tip of Saudi Arabia, where they would spend a few weeks modifying some army Humvees to ready them for us to use in Afghanistan. Because of my air quals, I stayed behind in Kuwait to pack up all our gear. I knew how to build a pallet, how to label all the hazmats, weight it all correctly, and work with the aircrews to make sure everything was safe and to spec. I got everything packed and all our pallets loaded onto a big old C-130 and boarded it to make the roughly 1,000-mile flight to Oman.

Once on the plane and nestled safely among the pallets, I settled in to grab some sleep.

A short while later, I woke up. Something was wrong. The plane was humming along, but at an odd pitch. I jumped up and headed for the cockpit to see what was going on. Didn’t take long to find out. We’d lost an engine.

I woke up our crew chief and told him what was happening. He freaked out. It was the middle of the night, and we were rapidly losing altitude over the Persian Gulf. Warning lights were going on all over the cockpit. I woke up the rest of the guys and briefed them in a few sentences. We had work to do.

To help compensate for the plane’s awkward angle and the resulting shift in its center of gravity, we had to move our gear. A crew of us got behind one big pallet and started pushing that sucker forward. It was mighty heavy, and because of the plane’s tilt the push was all uphill. We moved it about 10 feet and locked it into place, then got to work on another one. Pretty soon we had the plane leveling out, and the pilot made a successful emergency landing in Bahrain, about halfway to our destination, where we spent the rest of that night before giving it another try the next morning.

It was a mighty inauspicious way to start a mission into one of the deadliest places on the planet. It was a good thing I didn’t believe in omens. Or at least, not as much as I believed in our guys and our training.

The next day we and our C-130 made it the rest of the way to Oman, where we joined the rest of our platoon at a large staging area. By this time operations in Afghanistan were well under way. On October 7, while my buddies and I were boarding oil smugglers off the coast of Iraq, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair each announced the commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom, a joint effort between the Afghan United Front and U.S. and U.K. forces to oust the Taliban and al Qaeda influence and destroy their terrorist training infrastructure in Afghanistan. That same day, American and British air forces began massive aerial bombardment of Kabul and a few other key locations in Afghanistan. By the time our platoon was staging in Oman, the Taliban’s control over Kabul had been decimated, and our guys were starting to establish a foothold.