by Brandon Webb
Still, this was a perfect mission for SEALs, and we’d had teams in there supporting the operation for years, ever since Desert Storm. In violation of U.S.-led sanctions, these maritime operators were feeding a huge black market, getting illegal oil on the cheap and selling it on the open market for millions in profits. Some were Middle Eastern nationals; others were British sea captains gone rogue. I’d met a number of both varieties in the back-alley bars in Bahrain. Another term for these characters would be “pirates.”
These ships were coming out of Iraq sealed shut and tight as drums. To prevent being caught by boarding teams, these guys would literally weld themselves in so nobody could get to them. When the regular navy tried to board a vessel like that and take it over, they would be completely stymied and unable to get inside.
That was where we came in. We knew how to get on and into these boats silently, quickly, and effectively, boarding in minutes. We also didn’t screw around. If the metal ship doors were welded shut, we’d cut our way in through the roof with an acetylene torch. But we’d have to move fast, because the moment the smugglers realized they were being boarded they would take aggressive action and haul ass for nearby Iranian waters—and if they made it, that was game over. Once they were outside that narrow channel of international waters, there’d be nothing anyone could do but clamber back off their damn boat and head back empty-handed. So when it came time to take down a smuggler’s boat, we knew we had to move like lightning.
This was where that VBSS (Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure) training we did off the coast of San Clemente Island paid off. There’s a reason SEALs train constantly, and this was it. We nailed those guys.
Typically there’s a lot of adrenaline pumping during a maneuver like this. You’re going out in the middle of the night, coming up alongside a vessel doing 15 to 20 knots, keeping your craft even with it and trying your best to put your whole team on board before the bad guys are even aware you’re on them. Even in normal circumstances, this is an exacting and exciting procedure. Now everything felt heightened. With the events of 9/11 just weeks behind us like a fresh and gaping wound, the air crackled with an angry electricity. We would quietly shoot the shit to keep ourselves occupied, but none of us were feeling casual about what we were doing here.
Our platoon was outfitted in black from head to toe, wearing balaclavas, those Ninja-style masks that conceal the entire head except the eyes. A few of our guys who spoke Arabic had dubbed our team Shaytan abyath, “the White Devils,” after overhearing crews captured from a few of the smugglers’ ships we’d taken down muttering the phrase in our direction. We embraced the name, and I used the idea of it in a patch I designed for our platoon: an image of a white devil on a black background underneath “3ECHO.” In addition to our platoon patches, we also had NYFD patches sewn onto our uniforms to pay homage to fallen heroes back home. To say that we were in the mood to kick some ass is to put it mildly.
The platoon would leave at sunset for its late-night operation on a small high-speed Special Ops boat called a Mark V. The Mark V is a modern marvel of design, equipped to take sixteen SEALs out some 500 miles from source to staging; its angular shape and low silhouette reduce its radar signature, making it hard to detect. Once out in the middle of the international shipping lane, the platoon would sit there silently in the dark, staging for minutes or hours, waiting for the word to go. Meanwhile, the platoon’s sniper would be nearby in the helo, quietly trolling the area and looking for targets.
As a sniper, you have the big picture in the helo; you orchestrate the silent, deadly nighttime dance. It’s the sniper’s job to identify targets using the helicopter’s forward-looking infrared system (FLIR) and pass critical target information to the platoon. In the helo, we are the eyes of the operation; the FLIR, a glass bubble on the bottom of the craft, has a range of over 50 miles. Nestled in the back of the Sea Hawk, you sit there watching that 18-inch green screen with a clear view of what’s happening miles away down on the Gulf’s surface. Once the team begins boarding the ship, you are the one passing real-time intel on all onboard activity to the team leaders. It’s also your job to take out any targets that threaten the operation, if it comes to that, though this is a rare occurrence.
As Glen and I had done on the bridge of the crippled USS Cole, Osman and I shared this role. As sniper on duty, we’d participate in the nightly helicopter crew briefing, then hit the deck and take off in the bird to go cruising for targets. The rest of the platoon was stationed onshore at Camp Doha, and they would ride out every night in the Mark V, spend a few hours out on the Gulf, and then, about 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., ride back in to Kuwait for the night. Not us. Because the helo deployed directly off the deck of the destroyer out in open waters, one of us would live all week on board the ship right along with the helicopter squadron. They set up a cot for us in the weapons hold area where we would sleep with our guns. (We preferred to keep them on our person. What better way to know they were secure?) For all practical purposes, when not out on a mission we lived in that room.
We did this for weeks. Osman and I rotated out, trading off being on sniper watch and being part of the boarding teams. During the month or so we spent out there, we took down about half a dozen smuggling vessels. It was fun work, though not especially dangerous.
One day we got a briefing from some guys from the National Security Agency (NSA) about a terrorist transport boat they’d been keeping an eye on. They thought it might be coming out of Iraq soon with a substantial cache of weapons and HVTs (high-value targets) on board. Whether “high-value targets” meant a known terrorist, hostile intel asset, or other person of interest, I didn’t know, didn’t need to know, and frankly didn’t care. Whatever or whoever was on that boat, it was important. They described the target vessel’s profile and gave us its identifying mark: Alpha-117.
This was the same ship, they said, that had been used by al Qaeda operatives to smuggle out the explosives that had been used to blow up U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi back in the summer of 1998, while I was just finishing up my Seal Tactical Training and preparing for my Trident. Those attacks had killed more than two hundred people, including a dozen Americans, and injured over four thousand more. That was the terrorist attack that had put bin Laden on the map (and the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list) for the first time.
This was no measly oil-smuggling operation. This was for real. These guys were serious bad actors who had spilled American blood, and they would be armed. The intel guys were briefing all American assets in the region, they said, and then they gave us the rules of engagement for this particular situation. “If you guys see this target,” they told us, “you’re authorized to take it down.” Period.
A few days passed, and Osman rotated out to the team while I took his place on sniper duty. As much fun as it was being part of the team in a smuggler takedown operation, I looked forward to being back on sniper watch. I have always loved flying, and this gave me the chance to go out every night in a bird. The nights when we didn’t see any noncompliant vessels, the crew on the surface would have nothing at all to do, but even on those nights, up in the helo I was kept relatively busy manning the helo-based surveillance equipment, and I enjoyed it.
My first night back on watch, I sat in the back of an H-60 Sea Hawk helicopter, shooting the shit with the crew over our comms as we made our way in slow, lazy arcs across the water and back. I didn’t know which had a more soporific effect: the monotonous, high-pitched whine of the helo’s rotors or the sweltering thickness of the Middle Eastern air. We kept the helo door open as we cruised, which provided a slow, muggy breeze. To pass the time and keep ourselves alert, we talked about everything we could think of, from sex to our taste in music to war stories of our training days. It was a few minutes after midnight.
An hour earlier I’d been on the flight deck of a U.S. destroyer a few hundred miles away in the middle of the Gulf, sitting in on the helo crew’s briefing and adding my own input before takeoff. I’d grabbed
my kit, and the four of us had saddled up—two pilots in front, the rescue swimmer/sensor operator (the role I was originally trained for before going into BUD/S), and me—and made our way toward our rendezvous with the rest of my platoon. Now here I was, crouched in the back of our blacked-out Sea Hawk in the murky nighttime atmosphere over the Port of Basra off the southern tip of Iraq, trolling for smugglers.
Chr chr chr chr chr chr … The Sea Hawk rotor chopped relentlessly through the hot, soupy atmosphere as we swapped stories in the sweltering moonless night.
I’d been staring at the FLIR screen for a while when I saw something that made me sit up straight. I glanced down to scan my notes from that intel briefing a few days earlier. What was that boat’s call sign again? I looked back up at the FLIR and murmured, “Holy shit.” Right there on the pale green screen I could see the identifying numbers on the boat’s stern: ALPHA-117. I was staring at the target the NSA had briefed us on, the ship that had supplied the explosives that had taken out our embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania.
In our nightly game of maritime poker, it looked like we had just drawn the joker from the deck.
This was hot. We thought we’d been sidelined while another platoon went ahead of us into the action in Afghanistan. Now it looked like maybe we were going to be the first to see serious action after all.
I radioed Lieutenant Chris Cassidy, our platoon commander on the Mark V, and told him I had the target ship on the FLIR. “Solid copy, stand by,” he replied and then clicked off. I waited, knowing that he was radioing command on the destroyer a few hundred miles out on the Gulf. Word would come back almost instantly. Sure enough, a few seconds later my comm crackled back to life. “Sniper One, this is Echo One, good copy on all. We are taking her down, get us good eyes on.”
Cassidy’s a good man, I thought. Just weeks from now he would be leading us through a complex reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan, and he would later go on to become a NASA astronaut and complete three space walks. Right now I felt good knowing he was in charge of the crew on the Mark V. I’d seen some bullshit leaders, and Cassidy wasn’t one of them. I was confident this would go smooth and fast.
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.
