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And our baby—a boy, I think, but don’t really know—I feel the impossibly smooth baby skin and smell the clean baby hair. Here nothing matters but that our child is with us and we are together and I can feel the whispery breeze of baby breath gentle against my lips.

That scene helped me keep going, much farther than I would have been able to do on my own, reminding me I had to survive this ordeal and allow the images to become reality. I prayed for strength and asked God to be with Erik and my dad on the coming day. I could feel that Erik was pounding down every door he could. For him, the sheer frustration of it had to be as corrosive as my sustained hunger and deteriorating medical condition. Knowing him and his need to put things right, I wondered if his torment was worse than mine.

I fall asleep in his arms, holding our baby, safe with my husband and our child in our great big bed at home.

In the ninety-three days since the kidnappings, the FBI team had accumulated a trove of secret intelligence on the kidnappers. The U.S. clandestine service keeps up an active surveillance all around the Horn of Africa region because of its importance to international shipping and vulnerability to terrorism. When working an active case, observations from the ground and the air are supervised and coordinated by the FBI’s Nairobi office, which shares the same responsibility with all foreign FBI offices representing American interests abroad. Most of the time this involves fighting complex structures of international crime, but it also applies to the protection of any individual citizen who falls victim to major crime abroad.

In both cases, the FBI works on the premise that its law enforcement efforts not only help American citizens but also help secure the region for local people. This aids in maintaining a collaborative atmosphere that proves vital during times when a little quid pro quo is needed and local intelligence is required.

In Jessica’s case, the FBI traced the forces behind the kidnapping to a consortium of three local clans from southern Somalia. The Habr Gidir clan region stretches from the southern part of Galkayo down toward the capital of Mogadishu. Criminals
belonging to three of the Habr Gidir subclans, Sa’ad, Suleiman, and Ayr, were believed to have cooperated in arming and manning the operation.

Unfortunately for the kidnappers’ venture, by the time President Obama was ready to order a raid, the Americans knew exactly how many were on the Somali side: twenty-six grown men and teenaged soldiers, all rotating through the camp in shifts.

Information about whether an aerial surveillance drone was used in this rescue operation is classified, and there is a chance the distant engine that sounded like a generator, which Jessica, Poul, and the kidnappers sometimes heard in the distance, wasn’t a drone, but an actual generator out there in the scrub desert.

If a drone was in fact employed, the capabilities of prevailing technology would have enabled it to circle at altitudes beyond visual range, and it would have been able to loiter over the site for hours at a time. If it was there, publicly available knowledge confirms it would have been able to transmit clear photos and video shots regardless of the lighting, day or night. When this data was combined with the information gleaned from the ground (if in fact it was), the Americans would have learned the specific kinds of weapons and ammunition available to the Somalis and the approximate level of skill and determination they were likely to display. The weaponry in the camp was that of quasimilitary militia, and the fighters had to be expected to put up stiff resistance if they had the chance.

The Americans also knew that each of the dozen times medicine was sent in to her, the kidnappers intercepted it and refused to pass it on. The Americans knew the “doctor” claiming to be kept on hand by the kidnappers to “guarantee the health of the hostages” was doing no such thing. They knew he had done nothing for either hostage beyond checking blood pressure on one occasion. He was described by Jabreel the negotiator as “available around the clock,” but instead he spent most of his time
unavailable in the nearby “International City of Adado,” staying in the same guesthouse Jabreel was using. His cover story fooled no one, and the negotiator lied badly about his actions. Again the kidnappers failed to grasp the reality of modern surveillance.

The FBI knew Jess’s NGO had paid more than $12,000 in “fees” to get a doctor in to see Jess, in a desperate attempt to get the life-saving medicine to her. And thanks to Erik’s tireless updates on her condition, made possible by his ability to read between the lines of what she told them to hear what she wasn’t permitted to say, the Bureau knew that internal infections from the filthy conditions had begun to wreck her kidney function. They advised the military to have the necessary medical supplies on hand at the moment of rescue.

The FBI knew, most of all, that this complete lack of medical assistance was being inflicted strictly for the purpose of increasing the tension for Jessica’s family. The kidnappers hoped to raise the ransom level by forcing her family or friends or employers to hurry up and “save” her.

This, as it happens, was their greatest moment of fatal vision. Because it completed the third of the three necessary ingredients for triggering the order to make a military raid on foreign soil—that the kidnap hostage’s survival is in immediate peril. Jessica was being gradually killed by her captors, and the process was picking up speed. Although there was no word indicating her male colleague was also in a medical crisis, the conditions inflicted on both of them would ruin anyone’s health.

Prompted by the medical report provided by Erik from their consulting physician, the Bureau sent their simple analysis traveling on up the food chain. The problem caused by Jessica’s continued lack of access to the medication to regulate her thyroid was compounded by the infection that began in her urinary tract but was guaranteed to spread, given her overall weakened state. If her weakened thyroid picked up the infection, her system could quickly
fail. It was now clear that unless drastic measures were immediately taken, the American hostage would soon become a casualty.

There were compelling reasons to prevent her death, on top of the usual humanitarian concerns. Jessica was known to have been part of an organization involved in a demining project to help protect the local people. This nongovernment organization supplies direct relief to some 450,000 refugees in the border region of Somalia-Kenya. As a worker struggling to help save the local children, her death at her captors’ hands couldn’t be a worse tragedy at both the personal and the political levels. Her devastated family would be joined in their grieving by an outraged population.

Erik saw to it that everyone in the chain of command got the information that the tipping point had been reached; if they didn’t get her out fast she would soon die. He also understood that upon Jessica’s demise, the prognosis for her Danish colleague would be just as bad. At this point those authorities agreed with the need for a rescue attempt.

The conclusion was submitted to the secretary of defense: Immediate risk now exceeds the many dangers of a raid. The required response was now a studied act of extreme prejudice, forcing a decisive conclusion, and terminating any hostiles who got in the way.

President Obama received a briefing telling him the health of American Jessica Buchanan was rapidly failing. His decision had boiled down to the choices of sending in a rescue team or hoping she could somehow survive on her own. He ordered immediate planning for a raid by SEAL Team Six.

On the twenty-third of January, he met with his advisory team on the matter. The gist of their news for him was clear: Nothing’s going well with the negotiations, the kidnappers continue to make irrational demands, and the American hostage is in failing health. There is, however, going to be a full dark of the moon in two days’ time, during the early morning hours.

After hearing the latest assessment of the situation, the president ordered Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to have the rescue mission go hot. Panetta conveyed the order directly to the SEAL team commander, keeping the circle of information tight to maximize secrecy.

The attack was set to launch from the military base in Djibouti, taking off in a specially equipped air force C-130 on the evening of the following day. The strike team would fly down through Somalia, then parachute from the plane at a high altitude, landing a safe distance from the camp to silently prepare the raid.

•  •  •

Twenty-four Navy SEAL special operatives flying at a classified high altitude responded to the jump command like coiled springs, launching themselves into a brief free fall through the evening sky. As masters of the HAHO jump—High Altitude, High Opening—the elite SEAL team members confidently fell “dick in the dirt,” thrusting hips and torso into the direction of the fall, with arms and legs splayed wide to stabilize them. In the pitch black of the new moon there was no way for ground forces to see their aircraft or pick out the men descending toward them as tiny grains of silent trouble. Within a few seconds of leaving the plane, the SEAL warriors deployed their wing-shaped air foils and quietly flew their canopies down to the landing zone. The high-altitude openings prevented the popping sounds of the deploying chutes from being detected on the ground.

From the air, each man scanned the ground below for potential trouble and listened for anything that would give warning of a hostile presence. The SEALs all landed safely in one of the flat zones between mounds of scrub brush and the scraggly acacia trees not far from “The International City of Adado,” an oblong cluster of low-roofed buildings stretched about a mile in length and perhaps
half that in width. Its sparse population was a definite asset to the SEAL team. Unlike urban missions, in this one there would be no hordes of local fighters to spill out of nearby houses and plague the rescue. On this night there were no sounds but the faint noises of the squad switching out of their birdman rigs and into overland travel mode.

The land was so dark at that hour that naked human eyes were useless beyond arm’s length. To the extent that the men remained silent in the inkpad blackness, they were invisible. But for those with state-of-the-art optical equipment, each man was marked by an infrared beacon on his helmet. To one another they were brightly apparent and far less likely to draw friendly fire.

Within minutes, the two dozen SEAL warriors had stowed their gear and prepped for the silent hike to their target objective. They already knew they would be facing high-powered Kalishnikov assault rifles. Their sixty-pound vests included heavy ballistic plates for additional protection that could sometimes repel AK-47 rounds, under ideal circumstances. Because of them, pistol rounds, ricocheted rifle rounds, and even knife attacks were less of a threat.

But ballistic plates and Kevlar helmets offer scant protection against heavy-gauge rifle fire. Each of the SEAL operatives knew the enemy had been seen with heavy machine guns, and they knew the kidnappers were financed well enough to possess Russian-made RPG-7 rocket launchers. A single round could take out a large portion of the attack force and eliminate the hostages at the same time. These heavy weapons meant all of the captors had to be incapacitated with such speed there would be no time to put such things into play.

The SEAL attackers knew they were about to face such weapons because of detailed information gathered over the past three months. Each SEAL even wore desert camouflage matched to the local background. But these were the men you don’t see coming. If
they properly executed their careful plan there would be no need to hide. By the time daylight arrived they would have attacked unseen and disappeared in the same fashion.

Of all the SEAL team’s weaponry, their best protection on this night was offered by their night vision capability. Better to see and avoid the enemy than have to deal with his bullets. In the most advanced available version, four infrared vision tubes instead of the usual two allowed for a better field of vision. They rendered depth perception superior to anything else in the field. They would clearly reveal the details of the photograph each man carried of their American quarry. The picture could identify her if she couldn’t speak for herself.

The mission plan was to arrive at the site deep in the night, long after the new shift came on duty and the guards’ nerves were relaxed, their senses dulled. This might offer only the smallest battle advantage, but the SEAL team worked with whatever they could get.

The challenge facing the SEAL warriors had been put to them by their commander-in-chief because of the enormous national prestige at stake, but they were expected to ignore political pressures in the execution of the mission. No matter what the political players might have to say about it, everyone involved knew the only definition of success for this mission was to annihilate the kidnappers before they could harm or kill the two hostages—and to do it without killing the hostages themselves.