KBL (24 page)

20

National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California
March 8, 2011, 0700 Hours Local Time

Shortly after 0700, Alpha Troop’s 1-and 2-Teams, Charlie Troop’s 2- and 6-Teams, and Commander Dave Loeser and his Red Squadron executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Joey Tuzzalino, assembled in the lobby of the Landmark Inn, the only hotel located on the Fort Irwin grounds. They were all dressed in Army combat uniforms (ACUs) patterned in tan, green, and brown multicam. The ACUs bore an ID strip on the chest of their combat vest and infrared-readable American flags sitting on their right shoulder above the tab that identified the men as members of the Twenty-Seventh Civil Affairs Company, a unit that does not exist. Their rank tabs were all the same: E-5.

The only visual elements that differentiated them from regular Army troops were their appearance—they wore their hair longer than most Soldiers, and a few had facial hair—and the weapons they carried: instead of Colt M4s, they had suppressed piston-driven HK416s and the short-barreled LWRCI 7.62 rifles known as JKWs, and instead of Berettas, Sig-Sauer and HK semiautomatic pistols. You had to look twice to pick up on those subtleties.

Which was the idea. Clad as they were they looked no different from the thousands of Soldiers who used the Fort Irwin National Training Center for their predeployment urban combat training. The NTC, a hundred miles west of Las Vegas in California’s vast San Bernardino Desert, comprised roughly one thousand square miles of sand dunes, flatlands, and mountainous terrain in many ways similar to the topography of Iraq and portions of Afghanistan. Its airspace was restricted. Communications were ideal owing to the uncluttered electromagnetic spectrum in the sparsely populated region.

The site had been used by the military on and off since 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt first established an anti-aircraft range there. In 1942 the location was named after Major General George LeRoy Irwin, who commanded the 57th Field Artillery Brigade during World War I.

During the Cold War, Fort Irwin was one of the Army’s key armor and artillery training sites. The NTC was activated in 1979, and a resident opposing force was brought in to challenge incoming units. In the early 1990s, with the realization that much of future combat would occur in urban environments, unlike the great land war against the Soviets, the NTC instituted a curriculum dubbed MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) in December 1993.

Since 2005 Fort Irwin and the NTC had been designated the Army’s main training facility for urban operations training. Many of the local residents had been hired to role-play during the field exercises. Visiting Army linguists got to practice their language skills by donning Afghan or Iraqi dress and confronting the trainees in Pashto, Urdu, Dari, Arabic, and Farsi.

Today troops can train in Afghan villages and Iraqi towns, or wire-strewn urban warrens of alleys similar to the ones the Marines fought through meter by meter in Fallujah. There are clusters of buildings that can be adjusted to reflect the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, or Central or South America, giving troops the ability to practice the urbancentric combat that is known as the “three-block war” in venues that mimic Cairo or Kandahar, Lagos or South Lebanon, Jalalabad or Abbottabad.

On March 8 there were more than five hundred Soldiers on predeployment exercises at Fort Irwin, as well as fifteen hundred National Guard personnel training for urban and border-surveillance operations. The twenty-six SEALs went completely unnoticed.

The fact that Fort Irwin is a busy venue was precisely why Tom Maurer and Dave Loeser had selected it for the initial training site. It was, they understood, far easier to get lost in a crowd than to be the only game in town. And so, near the outer edge of the northernmost urban warfare training area, nestled behind a faux apartment block and down a thirty-foot-wide paved road leading to a Potemkin Village marketplace, they’d created an irregular, pentangled site roughly 225 feet in length and 150 feet at its deepest point, delineating the outer borders with telephone poles laid end to end. Within the irregular pentangle were six structures. One was three stories tall, one had two stories, and the remaining four were single level.

With Loeser’s vehicle in the lead, the SEALs parked their five Humvees a hundred feet beyond the site and dismounted.

The squadron commander and his XO stepped across the telephone poles. Loeser waited until the SEALs gathered around him. He pulled a small spiral notebook from his ACU breast pocket and opened it, checking the notes he had written.

“Here’s the mission,” he said. “Capture/kill a high-value target living in this”—Loeser indicated the three-story structure behind him—“location. Insertion by no more than two helos, which have to land and take off within the confines of the area indicated by the telephone poles.” He paused while the SEALs looked over the layout.

“The HVT will be living with family members and friends who may or may not be armed. The HVT may be wearing an explosive vest or have weapons within close proximity. There will most certainly be children, some of them young, who may or may not be used as human shields. The political implications of collateral damage are huge, especially where it comes to the children.” Loeser paused. “In other words, do
not
shoot any kids unless they are shooting at you. Everybody with me so far?”

Heron’s hand went up. “Hey, Boss, what about wives? I—”

Gunrunner’s hand shot up. “I know a couple of wives I’d like to shoot.”

Followed by Troy’s: “Okay, what about armed teenagers?”

Loeser waited for the laughter to subside. “Give me a break, guys.” He paused to look at Troy. “T-Rob, you know as well as I do there’s no bag limit on armed teenagers. You bagged enough of them last cycle in Helmand to know that. Wives, on the other hand . . .”

Padre: “There’s a three-wife limit.”

Gunrunner: “Then Rebel better watch out, he’s approaching it.”

More laughter as Rebel’s face flushed red.

Loeser called for order. “Okay, c’mon, guys, back to business. Constraints. Like all HVT templates, we have to be in and out within thirty minutes. We will infil and exfil on helos, so weight will be a factor. Insertion element will be twelve, secondary will be twelve. Assaulters are One-Alpha and Six-Charlie.”

“How many in the command element?”

“Three,” Loeser said.

He did
not
say, “Including me and Captain Maurer.” He and Maurer had discussed the assignment immediately upon the captain’s return from JSOC.

Maurer was not naive. There were only one or two HVTs in the world who met the criterion “devote a Tier One squadron for a couple of months to one single objective.” Usama was at the top of that list. And if it was going to be UBL, there was no way either Tom Maurer or Dave Loeser was going to miss the op. Even if one of them had to go as the K-9.

Rangemaster rubbed his upper lip. “And intel people?”

“Try to factor for two, but one is definite.” Loeser was being vague on purpose. If he had mentioned supplemental helicopters and a Ranger blocking force, the proverbial cat would have been out of the proverbial bag.

Loeser looked around to see if there were more questions. There weren’t, thank God. “Okay. Here’s how we’re going to go about this. Today I want you to walk the site. Discover it, learn it, measure it, war-game it. Look for vulnerabilities—its and ours. Work on identifying potential problems and possible solutions. Then come up with a preliminary action plan keyed to this one problem. At eighteen-hundred hours, we’ll assemble in a SCIF—we’ve been given use of one while we’re here—and talk things over.”

One-Alpha’s Geoff Ziebart looked surprised. “A SCIF?”

“Affirmative, Z. What we’re doing here is compartmented.” He scanned the SEALs. “Everybody hear that loud and clear?” He waited for a chorus of “Aye-aye, sirs.” When he got it, he said, “Good. Understand, gentlemen, this is very close-hold. And it has to stay that way.”

Loeser paused. “Any final questions?”

Heron’s hand went up. “Who’s the target, Mr. Loeser?”

Loeser was ready for this one. He could answer it truthfully, if not honestly. “I can’t say, Roger, because I haven’t been told.”

Gunrunner: “Any time restrictions on getting this planned, Mr. Loeser?”

“Timing’s indefinite, Blair.”

It was, too. Sort of. A full-scale copy of the Khan compound and the surrounding area in Abbottabad was being constructed on a ten-acre section of land adjacent to the rifle ranges at Fort Knox in Kentucky. Fort Knox was more than a gold repository. For the past decade it had been used as a training site for Tier One units. It was close enough to Fort Campbell so that DEVGRU could stage at Fort Campbell, at a site built for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), a site that could be configured to look like Jalalabad or Bagram.

They would load onto SOAR’s MH60-J and MH-47 helicopters and fly to Fort Knox as a complete assault element and rehearse the entire scenario at night under the same blacked-out conditions they’d face in Pakistan. Another plus: the Fort Knox site was isolated enough so that, unlike some other, more commonly known military bases, it seldom drew any media attention. So while Red Squadron’s final training iteration would take place where pilots, assaulters, the command element, and the Ranger blocking force could train together in what is known as a BILAT, or bilateral, exercise on a full-size doppelganger of the Abbottabad compound, for now Fort Irwin was the perfect place to start working out the kinks.

“You’re here for the immediate future,” Loeser said. “But our plans and prep time may be cut short any minute, so you gotta work as quickly as you can. The objective right now is to get this specific tactical problem worked out to my satisfaction, and Captain Maurer’s.”

He cracked a smile. “Hope you like the accommodations, gentlemen, because you’re going to be here for a while.”

21

The White House Situation Room, Washington, D.C.
March 14, 2011, 1636 Hours Local Time

It was, all things considered, the perfect day for this particular meeting. Secretary of State Kate Semerad was in Paris to host a G8 ministerial dinner as well as bilateral meetings with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed, and Japanese Foreign Minister Takeaki Matsumoto. But if necessary she could use the embassy SCIF and join by secure phone. The secretary of defense had no public schedule at all, and so he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were able to slip out of the Pentagon and be driven into the White House complex unnoticed. The president’s public schedule included a trip to a middle school in Arlington, Virginia, to talk about education, a visit with ISAF commander General David Petraeus, and a separate meeting with, as the official schedule put it, “senior advisors.” In the evening, POTUS would attend a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee.