by Damien Lewis
In the TOC, Dave and Alex heard his radio call, but Scotty was so badly affected by the smoke that he was almost unintelligible. They finally realized what he was trying to tell them: that he didn’t have the Ambassador or Sean with him, and that they were trapped in the Villa’s smoke-filled interior. Outside the TOC the Shariah fighters had tried to burn the SUVs parked there, but their jerry cans of diesel were empty. They also tried to break into Villa B, where the Ambassador’s two CP guys and the Libyan guard were holed up, but failed to do so.
Dave and Alex had watched all of this on CCTV. Leaving Alex in the TOC to man communications, Dave managed to fight his way across to the nearby Villa B—using a smoke grenade to cover his movements—and he reunited himself with the two CP guys. Together the three of them made their second foray into the grounds of the Embassy, trying to get from the TOC to the VIP Villa. Driven back by ferocious enemy fire, they grabbed an armored SUV parked outside the TOC and used it to break through the hordes of fighters now occupying the compound.
Dave and the two CP guys made it to the VIP Villa, whereupon they debussed and headed for the roof to put down fire onto the enemy. There they discovered Scotty, who was vomiting from severe smoke inhalation and in danger of losing consciousness. One of Scotty’s last acts had been to smash open a skylight in the VIP Villa’s roof in an effort to ventilate the interior and help the Ambassador and Sean trapped inside, but it didn’t appear to have had much of a positive effect.
Dave and the CP guys took up positions on the villa roof, so they could put down aimed shots onto the scores of heavily armed Shariah fighters now converging on their position. This was the fallback defense plan if the compound itself was taken—the idea being to hold the VIP Villa long enough for reinforcements to arrive and break the siege, and drive off the attackers. But as Dave would make so clear in a cell phone call to me, they had little hope of any force getting to their aid in time, due to the massive numbers of enemy surging into the compound.
All three of them—Dave and the Ambassador’s two CP guys—made repeated forays into the interior of the villa, using the same route through the window that Scotty had employed, searching for the Ambassador and Sean. If anything, the conditions inside were even worse. They were forced to snake along on their bellies, to try to keep below the thick and suffocating smoke. In spite of their efforts all they achieved was to make themselves violently sick, and all three ended up on the verge of losing consciousness.
While the Americans at the Mission had been fighting this desperate battle, I was doing all in my power to make good on my promise—to stand with them if the bad guys attacked. I was billeted away from the Mission compound, but just as soon as I’d got the warning call from my guards, I’d got my driver, Massoud, to head over to my place with weapons. We’d set out across the city, intent on launching a one-man rescue mission—for I doubted very much if Massoud was coming with me, and in any case I needed him to stay with the vehicle. If I did manage to rescue the trapped Americans, we’d need a driver and set of wheels to make our getaway.
Meanwhile, at the nearby Annex, the CIA’s head of security had heard explosions echoing across to them from the direction of the Mission. According to some media reports the call for help from the Mission was initially denied by the Annex CIA Chief of Base (COB), though this is disputed by the CIA. Either way, a seven-man team led by ex–Navy SEAL Tyrone S. Woods assembled—grabbing weaponry, ammunition, and night vision equipment in preparation for leaving the Annex to go to the aid of those under siege at the Mission.
Tyrone Woods was a member of the Annex’s Global Response Staff, former elite forces members contracted to provide security to CIA agents operating out of the Annex. Woods had served with the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Three and had won the Bronze Star with a Combat V for valorous duty in Iraq. He’d led ten reconnaissance missions leading to the capture of thirty-four insurgents in the volatile Al Anbar Province of Iraq. He’d also completed multiple tours of Afghanistan during twenty years of service with the U.S. military.
In 2007 he’d left the military and was working in the Annex as a Global Response Staff member, and he was hugely respected in that role. Ty Woods and his team were going to the Mission’s aid, with or without the COB’s blessing. It took twenty-five minutes from their first being alerted to the attack for the team from the Annex to be ready to go to the Mission’s rescue.
It was just after 10:00 P.M. when they set out driving two armored Toyota Land Cruisers. There were six of them, as one operator had been left to man radios—a vital role. In the time it had taken them to prepare to leave they had tried to muster support from various of the pro-government militias in Benghazi—which in part accounts for the delay—but none seemed willing to come to their aid.
It took that six-man team a good twenty-five minutes to drive the short distance to the Mission compound. This is largely because they would run into the same kind of resistance that Massoud and I would encounter—namely, scores of Shariah gunmen and their gun trucks, equipped with heavy weaponry. Roadblocks had been put in place to stop any relief force getting to the Mission, and—unlike Massoud and myself driving a local vehicle—the Annex team in their armored SUVs were highly distinctive from some distance away.
At one point the Annex team stopped to try to convince militia members—most likely 17th February Militia, who were massed around the battleground—to join them in their efforts to retake the Mission. Those requests were denied by the militias, and the QRF team were forced to move ahead with no help and taking savage fire as they drew closer to the Mission compound.
The sheer level of hostile fire that had engulfed the Mission was fearsome, but there was no way that Ty Woods and his fellows were turning aside from their tasking. At the same time, Massoud and I were converging on the battleground. After working there for so long I figured I knew of a secret route into the compound, and I was intent on launching my own rescue attempt.
This was the start of a night of sheer hell. It was a night upon which Americans would die in the most horrific of ways, and for reasons that to this day both escape and enrage me. It was a night upon which I would fight my way into the besieged Benghazi Mission three times over, and largely against orders, in an effort to find my American brothers-in-arms and to stand with them against the terrorist horde. It was a night on which I should have died many times over, along with my American buddies.
This was the blackest of nights—one that would lead me to find the American Ambassador to Libya lying dead and without a fellow American by his side. I’d discover him with a tiny cut to his forehead, but otherwise looking more or less unharmed—yet he had been murdered in the most inhuman of ways. In short, this was a night of criminal failure, of individual acts of unrivaled heroism, and of untold savagery and murderous intent on the part of America’s enemies.
But when I first deployed to Benghazi, I had not the slightest inkling about the nightmare that was coming.
CHAPTER ONE
April 5, 2012,
Tripoli, Libya
No one had told me about the money. It was only once I’d flown in to the Libyan capital, Tripoli, that I got the warning. Steve O’Dair was the guy who briefed me. He was a fellow private security operator, working “the circuit” as it’s called among those in the world of private military operations. Right now he was the Libyan country manager for Blue Mountain, the British private military company (PMC) that had contracted me to do the present job.
We met at the plush and glitzy Corinthian Hotel, in downtown Tripoli. With its space-age towers and golden arches the Corinthian would look more at home in Las Vegas, as opposed to Libya. Granted, there were a few bullet holes in the outer stonework, testifying to the recent fighting that had convulsed the country—fighting aimed at toppling Libya’s forty-five-year rule by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi—but otherwise the place looked pristine and gleaming.
We had a coffee and chatted a bit in the glitzy, palm-fronded lobby, and then Steve sprung the
surprise on me—the thirty-thousand-dollar surprise. Blue Mountain had two dozen Libyan guards working at the American Embassy complex in Benghazi, Libya’s second city. I’d come here to put that guard force through three weeks of intensive training, to lick them into shape.
Trouble was, their wages were overdue, and the only way to get the cash to them in post-Gaddafi Libya was for someone to carry it on their person on the flight to Benghazi. As I was about to fly onward to Libya’s second city, Steve had got it into his head that I’d be up for just such a mission.
It was less than six months since the Libyan “democratic revolution” had toppled Gaddafi’s regime—the dictator having been captured, tortured, and executed by those who had seized him. Blue Mountain was one of the few PMCs licensed to operate in Libya, and the company ran Tripoli’s Palm City residential complex, one popular with international businesspeople, United Nations workers, and the world’s media reporting on the story of Libya post-Gaddafi.
It was my first time in Libya, and after seeing the news reports of the recent fighting I had expected the capital to be far more war-torn. On the cab ride from the airport to the Corinthian I’d seen a handful of government buildings that had been turned into piles of twisted metal and shattered rubble, one of which the driver had pointed out gleefully was all that remained of Gaddafi’s Tripoli palace. Each had been flattened by a NATO air strike of impressive surgical precision, and there was little wider damage.
The NATO smart bombs had gone down as they are designed to—right on target. I’d soldiered in the Balkans, across Iraq and Afghanistan, and I’d been expecting a similar level of battle damage here as I’d seen in places like Sarajevo, Baghdad, or Kabul. But apart from the occasional NATO demolition of specific targets, the impression I got was that it was business as usual in Libya’s capital city.
Yet as Steve was quick to point out, and as Blue Mountain’s boss had warned me back in Britain, the toppling of Gaddafi had ushered in no benign new regime. The scores of rebel militias that had united under one cause—that of toppling the dictator—had just as quickly become disunited once Gaddafi was gone. At its simplest, Libya post-Gaddafi had become one massive power grab, with each militia vying to seize control of whatever moneymaking means it could.
As one of the worst examples—at least as far as I was concerned, now that I’d been asked to carry a serious chunk of cash on my next flight—the so-called Zintan Brigade had taken control of the airports. A militia that was best known for capturing Saif al-Islam Gaddafi—one of the last Gaddafi family members then at large—was now running security, customs, immigration, and passport control at some of Libya’s major transport hubs.
Unsurprisingly, it had proven a recipe for insecurity and chaos, not to mention massive racketeering. My first sight of one of the Zintan mob had been upon my arrival at Tripoli International Airport. A guy dressed in gray combat-style pants, a skintight white T-shirt, and a wide-brimmed khaki jungle hat slung around his neck had been standing guard as I’d disembarked from my flight from London.
I’d noticed the Nike runners on his feet, the thick, half-length beard, and the worn AK-47 assault rifle slung over the shoulder. But most of all I’d noticed the guy’s predatory, wolflike gaze, as he’d scrutinized the new arrivals for what I had to presume was lucrative prey. And that encapsulated the problem with me being the cash mule for Blue Mountain: I’d be going through Tripoli airport carrying thirty thousand dollars, while under the scrutiny of the Zintan Brigade.
Moving around with large bundles of cash wasn’t so uncommon in the world of private security operations. It stands to reason that in many war zones or postconflict countries the rule of law has broken down, and the banking system with it. In such situations the only way to pay a local guard force is invariably in cash dollars.
In the past I’d carried a lot more than the thirty thousand Steve had asked me to take. Presuming it was in one-hundred-dollar bills, it would make a bundle less than an inch thick. I could slip it inside an envelope and carry it on my person, or I could conceal it inside one of the books in my hand luggage. I was plowing through the memoirs of Britain’s iconic wartime leader, Winston Churchill, and one of those tomes could easily hide thirty thousand in hundred-dollar bills. Like that it would be all but undetectable and shouldn’t prove a major drama.
Or so I thought.
It was Mohammed, one of Blue Mountain’s local drivers, who came to take me to the airport. Shortly after I finished chatting with Steve I slipped into the rear of Mohammed’s smart American Mustang, and we set off to catch my flight. Mohammed spoke excellent English and we got down to business right away.
“So, Mohammed, where’s the cash?” I was expecting him to pass me an envelope.
Instead he jerked a thumb at the vehicle’s rear. “In the back, my friend.”
I glanced around, but all I could see was a large plastic travel bag lying on the floor.
“Where in the back?” I asked.
“There in the bag, where d’you think?”
“Which bag?”
He eyed me in the rearview mirror, irritably, like I was the one being difficult. “You haven’t seen it? The bag lying at your feet.”
I reached forward and unzipped it. Maybe there was an envelope of cash lying on top of a load of other Blue Mountain equipment. But no. The bag was stuffed to the brim with what I recognized immediately as the local currency—Libyan dinar. Unfortunately, thirty thousand dollars’ worth of Libyan dinar fills your average travel bag to bursting—just like this one was now.
It was my turn to eye Mohammed. “Libyan dinar. No one said it was thirty thousand dollars in jingly money. What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”
Mohammed laughed, like it was all a big joke. “No problem! No problem, my friend.”
“No problem. How d’you suggest I get this lot past the Zintan Brigade?”
Mohammed waved his hand dismissively. “No problem. It will be fine.”
It was easy for him to say that, when he wasn’t the one tasked to carry it. Thirty thousand dollars in whatever currency was the equivalent of several years’ wages for someone like Mohammed, or one of the Zintan Brigade fighters. I’d heard the horror stories about what was going down at Libya’s airports under their control. Two weeks earlier a private security guy had tried going through the airport with one hundred thousand dollars in cash. They’d pulled him aside and taken the money, and he’d been lucky to escape with his life.
The Zintan Brigade hailed from the Zintan region of Libya, being a loose coalition of some twenty tribal groups. They’d been brought into the capital by the Tripoli Brigade in some kind of trade-off: Zintan got the airports while the Tripoli Brigade got all the government offices. But at night the city was alive with gunfire as the rival militias fought each other in what amounted to turf wars. To a Westerner they all looked the same: Zintan, Tripoli, whatever—they all wore a hodgepodge of military equipment, plus tight T-shirts, and carried the ubiquitous AK-47. But somehow they knew how to distinguish between each other at a glance, which had to come in useful when engaging in firefights.
I glared at the bag stuffed full of dinar lying at my feet. Mohammed was prattling on about this and that, as if the small matter of a giant travel bag bulging with cash wasn’t an issue. There was no way that I could refuse to carry the money. I knew how badly we needed it at the Benghazi Embassy, and more to the point I had a huge amount invested personally in the job I was tasked with doing here.
I’d taken the Benghazi contract for several reasons, the most crucial of which was Lewis. For the first time in thirty-seven years—the last twenty of which I’d spent soldiering in the world’s trouble spots—I had someone else depending on me now: my son. Lewis had only just turned one. He was the most important thing in my life and the best thing that had ever happened to me. Of course, his mother and my partner, Laura, came a very close second.
It’s all too easy to go dodging bullets in danger zones when you’re
a one-man band. In fact, the work is hugely addictive. Nothing comes close to the buzz of getting shot at and surviving. It makes you feel so incredibly alive. But having Lewis had changed all that. I’d taken the present contract because Libya post-Gaddafi promised to be far less risk-laden than working in Iraq or Afghanistan, or taking some of the antipiracy missions that I’d worked on recently, acting as an armed escort to ships plying the lawless waters off Somalia.
During the past two years I’d led scores of security teams on antipiracy operations. We’d been under serious attack three times, with Somali pirates doing their utmost to board our vessel and take us and the ship’s crew hostage. Working at the U.S. Embassy’s Benghazi Mission promised to be a far less risky undertaking, or so I reasoned. Having worked directly for the U.S. military and diplomatic clients, I knew how impressive the Americans’ security setups tended to be. The Benghazi operation was bound to be a veritable Fort Knox, and I’d promised Laura I’d be safe as could be on this one.
The other key reason I’d taken the job—and why I couldn’t refuse to carry the money—was Robert Smith, Blue Mountain’s boss. I’d been brought up by a single mother in an impoverished housing project in the Welsh mountains—Wales being one of the countries that make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain (along with England, Scotland and Northern Ireland). Robert hailed from the same Welsh valley as I did, and I respected him more than just about any man in the world. I guess he was something of the father to me that I’d never had.
One of the few careers open to a boy who grew up in my hometown was joining the British Army. I’d signed up at sixteen and spent ten years soldiering in the Royal Corps of Signals, a communications-specialist unit of Britain’s armed forces. But with the sport of rugby being such a strong tradition in Wales—a country with just three million inhabitants fields one of the top international rugby teams—I was snapped up to play for the British Army.
