As the others filed out, Petraeus said, “They don’t need to come back for a while.”
When the others were gone, and they were sitting alone, Petraeus asked, “So, what do you think is going on?”
Ostlund guessed that either they were going to do a raid to try to free Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier taken captive by the Taliban almost two years earlier, or they were going after bin Laden. He wanted to add Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s Number Two, but he couldn’t remember how to pronounce the name.
“Yeah, it’s the latter,” said Petraeus.
They sat side by side in the large windowless room, at the head of a U-shaped table lined with now-empty computer stations, facing a wall with eight different plasma screens. They received no video feed from the bin Laden raid because the CIA was running it, but both men could monitor the live chat from JSOC headquarters, the CIA, and the White House.
Petraeus commandeered Ostlund’s keyboard and began tapping out questions to the various principals. At one point he directed a question to Admiral McRaven, calling him “Bill,” which alarmed Ostlund. Petraeus’s comments were being conveyed on the colonel’s line, and he was not used to addressing his commanders by their first names.
He asked, “Sir, could you let them know that this is coming from you?”
With a final order from Panetta—“Go in there and get bin Laden; and if he isn’t in there, get the hell out!”—McRaven launched the raid.
The two Stealth Black Hawks lifted off from the airfield at Jalalabad precisely at eleven p.m. local time. They were blacked out and both carried a full, minutely calculated load. Each of the SEALs was in full kit: desert camouflage, helmet, night-vision goggles, gloves (for fast roping), and hard knee pads (better for dropping to a knee for shooting). Each carried a booklet with photos of the people they expected to find in the compound. They were armed with various pistols and short-barreled automatic rifles outfitted with silencers. They carried only light arms because the compound was not heavily defended. While they might encounter armed men once on the ground, there would not be many. Attacking loud and fast in darkness, with finely choreographed moves, able to operate in the night as if it were day, the SEALs would have an overwhelming advantage.
About ten minutes into the flight the choppers rose above a series of rugged peaks and crossed into Pakistan. As soon as they did, the three big Chinooks lifted off from Jalalabad. One would set down just inside the border on the Afghan side. The other two would proceed to the staging area north of Abbottabad by a different route. The Black Hawks eased down into the wide Mardan Valley, flying well north of Peshawar, moving fast and hugging the terrain.
The special operators of JSOC like to see themselves as “the point of the spear,” and these two helicopters racing east in darkness were unquestionably that. Here was the final thrust of an enormous effort that stretched back over nine and a half years—further if you considered the whole modern history of special ops. The post–9/11 effort to find Osama bin Laden and his small band of zealous killers had engaged two presidential administrations and many thousands of people in America’s military and intelligence communities: the analysts working in shifts, the CIA officers rebuilding human spy networks, and the combined satellite and aerial and electronic surveillance efforts of an alphabetical jumble of agencies and branches, developing drones and secure live telecommunication links, creating computer software, and honing strategy and tactics. If a nation must learn how to fight each war anew, borrowing from its existing arsenal, adapting, and innovating to meet the threat, then the SEALs on these Black Hawks were, in effect, America’s response to the challenge of 9/11, closing in at last on the war’s ultimate target.
McRaven sat in a large rectangular windowless room with plywood walls, surrounded by manned computer stations and looking up at a wall of video monitors. One monitor would show video of the raid itself—the Sentinel feed—but there was nothing to watch there yet. Another had a graphic display showing the location of the choppers. There was some tension as the two smaller choppers crossed into Pakistan, followed about fifteen minutes later by the two Chinooks, but none of them tripped alarms at that country’s air defenses. With the full array of national security assets at his disposal, McRaven was able to monitor exactly what the Pakistanis were doing… and as the minutes went by it became clear that they were doing nothing. The task force had entered Pakistani airspace before, on covert missions into the tribal areas, so they had been confident they could slip in unnoticed, but it was nevertheless a relief when it had been done. The admiral had precalculated a point where, even if the Pakistanis woke up, the mission would proceed. Soon enough they had passed even that point. Now, as the blacked-out choppers moved toward Abbottabad, there was nothing to do for about an hour but wait.
At that point, McRaven knew he would have decisions to make only if something went wrong.
Up on the big screen in the White House Situation Room, Panetta read out occasional updates on the choppers’ progress. One of Obama’s aides said, “Mr. President, this is going to take a while, you might not want to sit here and watch the whole thing unfold.”
“No, I think I’m going to go ahead and watch,” said Obama. In Chicago, nine and a half years earlier he had watched 9/11 unfold in a crowded basement room, now he would watch the final act of that drama from another.
Biden was typically restless, moving in and out of the room, and when he noticed that the live feed of McRaven and the Sentinel were up in the side room, he went in and sat down to watch there. Webb was hunched over his laptop at the head of the table.
In Jalalabad, McRaven’s sergeant major was sitting alongside the admiral, communicating on a chat line with Webb and others in the command loop. He looked up.
“Hey, sir,” he said. “General says the vice president just walked in.”
Secretary of Defense Gates was not far behind.
McRaven knew that the drumming chop of the approaching Black Hawks would be faintly audible about two minutes before they reached the target. The helicopters were stealthy, designed to avoid being spotted by radar, and quieter than standard models, but they still created racket when they were directly overhead. Approaching the compound from the northwest, the Black Hawks were now visible in the grainy overhead feed from the Sentinel.
After that, things happened very fast.
Everyone watched with shock as the first chopper, instead of hovering over the compound to drop the SEAL team from ropes and then moving off, as planned, abruptly wheeled, clipping the compound wall with its tail and hitting the ground. This clearly wasn’t good.
The Night Stalker pilot had tried to bring his Black Hawk to a hover, but the chopper wouldn’t perform the maneuver. It “mushed,” or began to skid uncontrollably. An after-action analysis would conclude that because the compound was encircled by stone walls, whereas the mock target in Nevada had only had a chain-link fence, the air beneath the hardworking Black Hawk warmed more rapidly than anticipated. That meant the air density was insufficient for the precisely calculated weight of the aircraft. The chopper could stay airborne only if it kept moving, so when the pilot halted its forward progress it fell.
The pilots of the 160th train for frantic moments like these. The pilot of the faltering Black Hawk moved with practiced speed. He found a plot of flat ground to execute a hard, controlled crash. It was in the compound’s western corner near an animal pen. He swung the craft’s tail in that direction and deliberately used it to clip the top of the western wall. This pitched the chopper forward and into the ground. The landing was hard, but upright, which was key. In those seconds the pilot’s maneuver had prevented the Black Hawk from pitching over on its side, which is a disastrous way for a helicopter to crash. If its still-spinning rotors strike the ground, the body of the chopper could be thrown or violently rolled. Instead, the nose was in the dirt. The SEALs were strapped in and were on seats designed to absorb a hard landing like this. One second the craft was skidding, and the next it was still, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, its tail rotor hung up on the top of the wall.