by John Weisman
There was a lot of it, too. What the American taxpayer had bought for the twenty-four-year-old, dark-haired Minnesotan whose radio call sign was T-Rob filled a standard twenty-foot dry freight container. That is, a steel box nineteen feet ten inches in length, eight feet six inches high, and eight feet wide. Filled it almost to overflowing.
That container, and dozens more just like it, each containing the equipment of a single SEAL, sat in a warehouse-like structure just east of Regulus Avenue and just north of Lake Tecumseh, at the northernmost edge of the sprawling Dam Neck campus that was the headquarters for Roberts’s unit, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, commonly referred to as DEVGRU.
DEVGRU was the current unclassified designator for the unit formerly known as SEAL Team Six. ST6 had been established in the wake of the disastrous hostage rescue attempt by Delta Force that ended with the debacle at Desert One on April 25, 1980, which cost the lives of eight American servicemen and the United States of America immeasurable loss of stature and prestige among both allies and adversaries. By late October of that year, ST6’s first CO, Commander Richard Marcinko, had hand-selected the unit’s initial seventy-two SEALs—Plankowners, in Navy parlance—plucking them from SEAL Team One in Coronado, California, and SEAL Team Two, based in Little Creek, Virginia.
Marcinko trained SEAL Team Six hard. The newly minted counterterrorists shot thousands of rounds of ammunition; perfected jumping out of planes at thirty-thousand-plus feet; endlessly practiced boarding cruise ships, tankers, and container vessels under way using flexible caving ladders and pure brute upper-body strength; honed assault tactics on everything from oil platforms to passenger jets to railroad trains. They deployed from submarines and commercial aircraft. They cross-trained with our allies’ best counterterror units: Britain’s Special Air Service and the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Squadron, Germany’s GSG-9, and Israel’s Sayeret Matkal.
But by the mid-1980s, ST6 had come under a cloud. Despite the undeniable fact that Six’s shooters were among the most capable in the world, unit discipline was known to be lax. Excessive drinking was commonplace, and fiscal restraint was acknowledged to be virtually nonexistent.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service initiated an investigation. Ultimately several of Six’s personnel, including its former commanding officer, Marcinko, were indicted, and some were subsequently convicted of felonies. Marcinko himself served a year in the minimum security section of the federal prison complex at Petersburg, Virginia. The charge: “Conspiracy to defraud the United States to commit bribery, Title 18, U.S.C., section 371.”
The upshot was that in 1987 the Navy changed the unit’s name in the hope that the stains on its reputation would be forgotten. They weren’t—not for another decade.
Nor did the new name really enter the lexicon. The Navy may have called the unit DEVGRU, but to most Sailors, and in popular culture, YouTube videos, computer games, and Rogue Warrior boy-book novels, it was—and always would be—SEAL Team Six.
0512 Hours
The temperature read thirty-six degrees as Troy turned into the wind and kicked into stride. The cold didn’t bother him; he always ran in shorts no matter what the weather, although his body core was protected by three layers of state-of-the-art, virtually weightless windproof and waterproof clothing topped by a fleece watch-cap.
Running had always been therapeutic for Troy. Even during BUD/S, the six months of hell all SEALs go through during their initial selection process, when all selectee candidates run a total of more than eight hundred miles, he had used the running sessions to zone out and let accumulated stress drain from his exhausted body.
Selection for DEVGRU was even tougher. Of the fourteen selectees who entered the six-month training cycle at Green Squadron in the fall of 2007, Troy was the only one to make it through.
But BUD/S—even Hell Week, when Class 237, which had originally numbered more than eighty, was whittled down to a few dozen and ultimately to eighteen—wasn’t anything compared to what was happening now.
His career at DEVGRU was on the line, which meant his Navy career was, too. Because Troy couldn’t see himself as anything but a SEAL. He’d enlisted in the Navy at eighteen, volunteered for BUD/S at the earliest possibility, and after two years at SEAL Team Four, made the selection cut for DEVGRU.
The bottom line was this: he was fully aware that he was living his dream and he’d never be able to settle for less. What would happen to him if they yanked his security clearance? He’d be out in the cold. With the economy in the toilet, a mortgage, Brittany with only a part-time job, their five-and-a-half-year-old son, Corbin, in day care, and a baby on the way. They’d lose the house. Everything. What would his pastor say? Troy was a devout and committed Christian. He and Brittany were active in their church.
This was not good. Not good at all.
It had been two months ago, almost to the day, when Troy was a member of the SEAL element tasked with rescuing a British national named Linda Norgrove, a thirty-six-year-old aid worker for a U.S. nongovernmental organization. Norgrove had been kidnapped on September 26 in Kunar Province, eastern Afghanistan. U.S. drones tracked her and her three Afghan colleagues as they were taken to a walled compound in Korengal Province. Using technical means—laser technology from the National Security Agency and imagery from the National Geospatial Agency—it was determined beyond a doubt that the kidnappers intended to mutilate and kill the hostages.
A nighttime rescue mission was put together. A six-man assault element from Red Squadron was assigned the task by Task Force 131’s commander.
Six of Norgrove’s kidnappers were killed in the initial assault, and during the chaos of that firefight, Norgrove managed to break free. But none of the SEALs saw this, and from the roof of one of the huts on the compound, one of the SEALs caught movement and instinctively tossed a grenade. Moments later, a mortally wounded Norgrove was discovered near the shredded body of a kidnapper.
During the mission debrief, the Red Squadron shooters never mentioned the grenade. First reports said Norgrove was killed because one of her captors exploded the suicide vest he was wearing, which paralleled the story the SEALs told during their initial debriefing.
But subsequent questioning by the Joint Special Operations Command task force commander, an Army Ranger lieutenant colonel who’d been watching the mission on Predator video, made it clear there had been no suicide vest. The commander’s review of the video showed one of the SEALs lobbing a grenade.
It was only then that the SEAL who had done it stepped forward. He was certain to face an inquiry that could lead to disciplinary action up to and including a less than honorable discharge. But the others were liable, too, because they had committed the sin of omission. They hadn’t lied; they had remained silent. Betrayed their honor code. The fact that Norgrove had been killed by mistake troubled Troy, but didn’t affect him, or the rest of his shipmates. They had all participated in scores of similar missions and understood that war is messy and that people—sometimes innocents—get killed, often by friendly fire. What was more troubling was the psychological disruption to the team. The incident and the subsequent investigation jarred them out of synch. The dynamics of the inquiry caused them to become individuals, as opposed to acting in unison. For the present, their unit integrity was shattered. Plus, their careers were in limbo. It was not a healthy situation.
Nine weeks later, Troy’s career was still on the line. Charlie Troop’s deployment had been curtailed. These days he was shackled to a desk at Dam Neck while the powers that be mulled his and his shipmates’ fates.
Worse, Red Squadron itself, and by extension all of DEVGRU, was under microscopic examination by some of the Navy’s manager-bureaucrats up in D.C., many of whom—ship drivers, Airedales, or submariners—bore no love for SEALs, whom they thought of as cowboys, loose cannons, or worse. And the Norgrove disaster only served to reinforce those negative opinions.
But this was a different Navy and a different SEAL team f
rom the old days. The old days, so Troy had heard, resembled the stuff that went on in the old movie Navy SEALs: lots of drinking, fast cars, and faster women. Outrageous behavior was all too often encouraged by SEAL officers and senior NCOs.
Not today. Today a single DUI could cause you to lose your top-secret clearance—and your job with the teams. So could a morals infraction. Today’s SEALs were far less likely than the frogs of the 1980s to spend nights out drinking at one of Virginia Beach’s many saloons. For T-Rob and most of his shipmates, it was one beer, maybe two, polished off at home. Because God help you if you got a short-fuse summons on your BlackBerry and you weren’t sober and ready to deploy.
But the situation wasn’t hopeless. Troy had two aces up his sleeve who might help his cause: JSOC’s ultimate commander was one; Troy’s close friend and teammate was the other.
COM/JSOC, the man to whom all DEVGRU SEALs ultimately reported, was himself a SEAL. Vice Admiral Wesley Bolin, USNA ’76 and BUD/S Class 95 (1978), had commanded SEAL Team Three in Coronado, then DEVGRU itself, and served in the number three position on the staff at the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa. Like his immediate predecessor at JSOC, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, Wes Bolin was a lead-from-the-front operator who often accompanied assault elements of Task Force 131, which specialized in capture/kill missions against high-value targets.
Bolin was also a scholar of warfare in general, and of special operations in particular, who understood that what war ultimately came down to was killing people and breaking things. And that winning meant doing it to them before they did it to you.
In fact, in 1994, as a student at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, Lieutenant Commander Wes Bolin had inspired his fellow student and SEAL Team Three colleague Bill McRaven to write Spec Ops: Eight Case Studies, a seminal work on special operations warfare. The book, published commercially a year later, dissected eight significant special operations warfare ops, including disasters (Operation Chariot, Britain’s 1942 raid on St. Nazaire), triumphs (the U.S. Army Ranger raid on the Cabanatuan prison camp in January 1945 and Operation Jonathan, Israel’s 1976 Entebbe Raid), and dry holes (Operation Kingpin, the U.S. Army’s abortive raid on Son Tay in 1970). McRaven had almost dedicated the book to Wes.
Troy had met Admiral Bolin, an Arizona native and former Naval Academy football letterman, during one of the JSOC commander’s frequent visits to Afghanistan. Wes Bolin had even ridden in Troy’s helo on two capture/kill missions. So the young SEAL knew he and his teammates would get a fair shake from the boulder-chested admiral with a bone-crushing handshake, whose radio call sign was Slam. It was Admiral Slam, after all, who had, more than once in public, referred to the politically correct, zero-defect Naval Pentagoners currently calling for Red Squadron’s heads on pikes as “perfumed princes.” And who was one of the few flag officers who regularly displayed loyalty down his chain of command as well as demanding that it bubble up from the bottom.
Troy’s other ace was Alpha Troop’s master chief. Danny Walker was Red Squadron’s official Old Man. Now forty-three, he had enlisted in the Navy after five years in the 82nd Airborne. He went through BUD/S Class 203 at age twenty-nine, the oldest candidate by four years. He’d been at DEVGRU for a decade now and was not only Troy’s best friend, but also his mentor and coach. They even attended the same church.
Danny’s advice had been short and sweet: “Think of this as Purgatory, T-Rob. It’ll sort out. And I’ve got your back. So keep your mind in neutral, your ass in gear, and your hatches dogged.”
It began to drizzle. Troy glanced up and scanned the horizon. There were gray clouds overhead, but he could see blue sky to the west. The rain wouldn’t last long. He picked up his pace, anxious to finish his PT and get to the office.
He hated doing nothing, and he knew the longer he was deprived of the shoot house, the helos, all the training that kept his skills honed, the longer it would take to get them back. But God, Troy believed—believed to his very core—had his reasons. There was a plan. Of course he didn’t know what it was, but it was there. Just as surely as God had allowed him to survive BUD/S and Green Squadron selection, just as surely as He’d given Troy the talent that allowed him to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft seven miles above the Earth’s surface, fast-rope from a helo, breach a door, and pull the trigger on a high-value target.
Yeah, life sucked right now. But God had a plan, and He would see Troy through. So Troy’s faith would keep him on an even keel until God revealed His hand and—dear Jesus, please—sent him back to war.
On the secular side, Troy also knew deep in his heart two of the basic truths that all SEALs know: first, that the suckiest job at DEVGRU or any SEAL team was a bucket-load better than anything else the Navy had to offer. And the second? One of Troy’s BUD/S instructors had said it best. It was during Hell Week, the evening of the second day. They hadn’t had any sleep yet. He’d had them rolling around in the cold surf—it was late February—then in the sand. Back and forth.
They were called whistle drills. First whistle, you hit the surf. Second whistle, you hit the beach. Third whistle, you crawled through the soft sand toward the instructors. Hit the water. Hit the beach. Roll and crawl. It went on for more than an hour. By the time the punishment ended, Troy’s soggy, sand-infiltrated camo fatigues weighed thirty pounds and his legs, back, shoulders, and chest were scraped raw. His ankles were bloody from the chaffing sand in his boots. He was sliding past the edge of hypothermia, shivering so hard he almost couldn’t stand up.
That was when he saw the next stage of Hell Week torture. Each six-trainee boat crew got its own telephone pole. First, they did twenty-five sit-ups, the telephone pole clutched to their chests. Then the pole got hoisted onto their shoulders. And was carried. For a mile. On the beach. In the wet sand. In the dark.
After less than a hundred yards, with his muscles burning, splinters digging into his shoulder, and half a dozen missteps when he thought his ankle was going to snap in two, Troy seriously, genuinely thought he was going to die.
That was the whole idea of Hell Week. Even though he couldn’t enunciate it at that point, Troy understood instinctively that it wasn’t the gazelles who would survive Hell Week, or the buffed-out weightlifters, or the me-first high school or college quarterbacks. It was the grunts—he hoped he was one of them—who just . . . kept . . . going. The grunts who drove through the pain and the hurt and the cold and helped their swim buddies make it through, too. The ones who never, ever gave up.
So Troy fought through the pain and the splinters and the swollen ankles. And the cold, the all-consuming, mind-numbing, totally penetrating cold. Cold he’d never come close to experiencing before. And at the end of that long, excruciating mile, when the instructors finally allowed them to drop the telephone poles and collapse, that was when Troy discovered the truth about life as a SEAL.
“Tomorrow,” the surfer-tan instructor had barked through his megaphone at the miserable trainees as they lay beyond exhaustion on the cold sand. “Tomorrow I’ll have you tadpoles doing shit that’ll make you think tonight was frickin’ fun.”
“Oh, yeah,” he shouted, backpedaling on the beach barefoot, a big fat Cuban Cohiba Siglo VI in his right hand. “Big frickin’ F-U-N!”
The instructor had almost tripped over himself he was laughing so hard. “Tomorrow, you’ll learn the only easy day . . . was frickin’ yes-ter-d-a-a-y!!”
5
U.S. Consulate-General, Lahore, Pakistan
December 23, 2010, 1000 Hours Local Time
Ty Weaver dropped his cell phone into the secure locker outside the door of the consulate’s Regional Security Office, where the facility’s Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, or SCIF, was located. He punched the cipher into the keypad and, careful not to disturb the plastic holly wreath, pulled the door open.
Weaver, thirty-six, was listed by the consulate as a technical and security consultant who owned Kronos International, an Orland
o, Florida, security company. In point of fact, Kronos was a CIA front, and Weaver, who had spent seven years as an operator at Delta Force, the Army’s Tier One hostage rescue and counterterrorist unit based at Fort Bragg, was currently a GS-14 working for the Ground Branch of CIA’s Special Activity Division (SAD), the Agency’s paramilitary arm.
He’d joined CIA in 2007, shortly after he’d served on a joint CIA-Delta mission in northwest China. Since then, he’d done two six-month tours in Afghanistan and a four-month temporary duty assignment (TDY) at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. For the past ten months, he’d been back home in Ashburn, Virginia, with his wife, Patty, working as an instructor at the West Virginia facility the Agency used to train its personnel in evasive and defensive driving maneuvers. It was perfect: a reverse commute every morning out to Summit Point, and home by five.
But in mid-October, Rich Erwin, SAD’s branch chief for special operations, had called him in and asked him to volunteer for a second TDY to Islamabad. The Agency needed an operator who knew the lay of the land to get out in the boonies and spot targets for its armed Predator drones. Ty had the experience in-country, as well as the tradecraft capabilities and the technical knowhow. So, would he go?
It was the absolute worst of times, and Ty let Erwin know why. Patty was five months pregnant. She’d had a miscarriage the previous year, and her doctor had ordered her to take things easy this time. This would be their first child. The Agency had promised that he wouldn’t have to travel until mid-2011.
He looked across the desk, furious that the branch chief had even brought the subject up.
Rich Erwin shrugged sympathetically. “Hey, I know how tough this is for you,” he said. “Problem is, we’ve just created a joint special program element with the Asymmetric Warfare Group’s D Squadron.”
That was news to Ty. For years the military’s special operations units and the Agency had had a prickly relationship. It was a leadership culture thing: sure, they’d been forced by circumstance and mission requirements to work together, but it was for the most part oil-and-water. The operators were fine; many had come from Tier One units or Marine recon. But at the top, there’d been no homogeneity, no symbiosis, very little of the finish-each-other’s-sentences kind of unit integrity practiced by Tier One operators.
