Shock Factor (6 page)

Their new hide had been long abandoned. Surrounded by a brown-gray outside wall, the house had no running water and only bare, dirty floors. The kitchen was empty and little furniture remained. The SEALs found a single table on the first floor, which Kyle carried upstairs and positioned in the back of one room with a window that overlooked Muhammad's crash pad. Then he and another sniper pulled a door off its hinges and laid it atop the table. That gave the men a stable firing platform, set back away from the window so that anyone outside would be unable to see the shooter and the weapon.

Part of the team, including the machine gunners, took station on the second floor in rooms on either side of Kyle's. The rest of the SEALs found good spots on the first floor or on the roof. The men on the roof would be their fail-safe. Their job was to stay hidden. If the firefight threatened to get out of hand and the SEALs needed additional weapons in action, they would either knock loopholes in the three-foot parapet that skirted the roof, or, in a dire situation, just come up over the wall and start shooting.

The snipers established fields of fire and handed out assigned sectors to search and target. Once all of that had been worked out, the men settled back into all the boredom of a Stateside police stakeout.

Halfway through the second week, the SEALs grew convinced that the Intel guys had blown this one. Though the team never let its guard down, and the men standing watch were always hypervigilant, the mood in the hide grew more relaxed. The scene took on the trappings of a camping trip with a gaggle of old pals. The bloated size of the team led to everyone being more cramped than usual, and living atop one another created its own stress and internal dynamics.

Then one afternoon a dust trail appeared in the distance. Three vehicles approached from a rutted dirt road, and as the snipers scanned the rigs, they could see that the middle rig was a candy apple Chevy Suburban with tinted windows.

Muhammad had arrived.

“Check this guy out,” somebody said. “He's got to be driving the only candy apple red Suburban in Iraq.”

“Arrogant bastard,” somebody else muttered.

Given how his vehicle stood out, Kyle wondered how it had taken so long to track the al-Qaida leader down.

Muhammad's convoy was coming from a different direction than the Intel guys expected, and the SEALs would not have the shot they had prepared for as a result. The original plan had called for the snipers to take Muhammad out as soon as he dismounted from his SUV and was positively identified. Now they realized that, thanks to the direction Muhammad was coming from, by the time his Suburban reached the farmhouse, he'd be on the wrong side of the rig for an easy kill shot. He would dismount and have the vehicle between him and the American snipers.

No plan survives first contact, and the SEALs adeptly switched gears. Instead of taking Muhammad out with sniper fire alone, they decided to use every rifle and machine gun to flay the enemy convoy with gunfire once they parked. They'd kill everyone, then get back aboard the CH-53.

The three vehicles rolled up to the safe house. The lead and trail rigs were Toyota HiLux pickup trucks, each with members of Muhammad's personal security detail. Altogether, the SEALs counted seven tangos plus their primary target.

The Mark 48 gunners fingered their triggers and waited. Before anyone could open fire, the team had to be absolutely certain they were going to kill the right people. This would entail a delay that could cost them a shot, but it had to be done.

The three rigs stopped near the safe house's front gate and the drivers shut their engines off. A passenger in Muhammad's Suburban dismounted and walked around to open the door for his commander.

The SEALs only had seconds now. Chances were, Muhammad would get out and walk straight through the front gate and disappear behind the nine-foot wall that surrounded the safe house.

The door opened. A dim figure wearing a Western-style jogging suit could be seen inside. He looked to be the right size and build for what they knew of Muhammad, but his face wasn't visible.

Both Toyota drivers popped their doors and stepped outside. They held AK-47s at the ready and began scanning the area with a professionalism the SEALs did not usually see from these terrorists. This bunch had been well trained.

The figure inside the Suburban moved. His face slipped into the afternoon sunlight as he climbed out of the SUV. It gave the SEALs the glimpse they needed. No doubt, the man in the jogging suit was Muhammad. As the snipers reported the positive ID, Muhammad's feet hit the dirt and he disappeared behind the Suburban. Their window to take him out had vanished that quickly.

The passengers in both Toyotas cracked their doors. Soon, the SEALs would face a tricky tactical challenge of having to take out all eight targets simultaneously before their quarry could take cover or return fire. No doubt the team's firepower could overwhelm Muhammad's security detail, but nobody wanted to suffer casualties from whatever return fire the enemy could muster. The trick was to bring everyone down before they could even get a shot off.

The Mark 48s thundered to life. All four gunners walked their fire through the vehicles at chest-height. One of the Toyota drivers went down, a fan of blood spraying across his vehicle. The other bolted, but managed only a few steps before the SEALs killed him. He tumbled and lay still, arms and legs sprawled, less than six feet from the lead pickup.

Short, accurate machine-gun bursts ripped into the trucks. The passengers in both Toyotas were torn apart where they sat. The man who had opened the door for Muhammad froze as his comrades died horribly all around him. Then Mark 48s caught him cold. More blood splattered the SUV and streaked down its custom candy apple clear-coat paint job as his lifeless body sank into the powdery dirt.

In seconds, the SEALs killed seven of the eight terrorists. Only Muhammad had survived. When the shooting started, he dove prone on the far side of the Suburban and nobody could see him well enough to get shots off. The Mark 48 gunners laid on their triggers, walking their fire back and forth until each man had burned through an entire two-hundred-round belt.

And then, an eerie silence descended on the scene. From his firing platform atop the table, Kyle scanned the SUV and could not see Muhammad. Taking out his security detail would serve little purpose if they couldn't kill him, too. The mission would be a failure; Tucker and Menchaca would go unavenged.

The Americans waited for Muhammad to make a move. The minutes ticked by. The snipers quartered off the SUV to ensure somebody would have a shot no matter which way he moved should he spring to his feet and make a break for it. Whatever happened, they could not allow him to go through that gate. He would be able to get inside the safe house unhindered, and the SEALs did not know if there were weapons in there. They would have to assault the house and hunt for him room to room, and that ran a substantial risk of taking casualties.

The SEALs stayed glued to their sights. Could Muhammad have been hit? Is that why he hadn't moved? The Mark 48s had sent eight hundred rounds downrange. The Suburban looked like bloody Swiss cheese. The Toyotas were riddled with bullet gashes. The convoy was a ghoulish scene. So perhaps their target had been hit. They couldn't be sure.

An hour passed with no movement. Something had to be done to end the impasse, but sweeping the target area with part of the team was deemed too risky. Intel had warned them that Muhammad's security detail all wore bomb vests. That information did not appear to be accurate, but the SEALs couldn't be sure. Perhaps Muhammad himself wore one, just in case he faced capture, so he could take a few Americans with him as he punched his own ticket to Allah.

There had to be an alternative to risking lives in such a move.

Inspiration struck the SEAL commander. Perhaps they could put one over on Muhammad if he was still alive. The team called in the CH-53 and they would stage a false extraction. A few minutes later, the bird arrived and set down behind the hide site. A third of the team rushed from the house and flowed over the helicopter's ramp to settle down inside. In seconds, the Super Stallion was back in the air, seemingly heading for home.

Kyle and the other snipers remained in the hide, waiting to see if Muhammad would react. It turned into a battle of patience. The SEALs relaxed, this was their sort of game. Kyle lay on the door, covering down on the nearest approach route between the SUV and the safe house's front gate. As they waited, the men bantered back and forth over who might get the shot. The machine gunners squared off against the snipers and challenged them. It was on now, and the friendly competition kept everyone alert and at their best.

An hour later, Muhammad's head prairie-dogged over the Suburban's hood. Just his eyes appeared as he took a quick look around. The SEALs held their fire. He ducked back down. A moment later, he reappeared and studied the hide site. He vanished, thought things over, and concluded that the Americans really had left.

He stood up, right in Kyle's field of view and sprinted for the gate. Kyle knew the range: three hundred yards, well within the Win Mag's capabilities. Long ago, his father had taught him to use a slow, steady pull on the trigger. He mirrored that lesson as he laid the crosshairs on his running target. Muhammad was moving laterally across Kyle's field of view, an almost ninety-degree angle. In novels and movies, this seems like a piece of cake. Pull the trigger and the target drops.

Baloney. Kyle faced a significant challenge by Muhammad's sudden bolt to freedom. Here's why:

Hollywood aside, shooting a moving target is no easy feat for a sniper no matter the range. There are two ways to do it: tracking and ambush. The tracking method requires following the target and keeping your crosshairs on him. To do it, you need to know your range to the target, the speed of the target, and the angle at which he is moving to your barrel. Then you set the crosshairs not on him, but in front of him. We call that “mil lead”

Mil lead is one of the quirky things about long-range precision marksmanship that makes it both an art and a science. Every sniper's mil lead is different. Even if the target is moving at the same speed and angle, no two snipers will need the same amount of lead to hit him.

When we train to hit moving targets, we keep detailed notes in our data books. The more we practice, the more data we develop and the better we can pinpoint the mil lead we need. It is a repetitive, sometimes frustrating task that is complicated by a couple of additional factors.

First, in the field we will never know exactly how fast a target is moving. So, for humans, we have three types of leads we practice based on average speed sets. The first is a “walking lead.” Every human walks at a different pace, but that pace is within a speed range that we can use to guesstimate our lead.

A “jogging lead” is used against men who are walking unusually fast or loping. This requires a little more lead. The last we call the “run lead,” which we employ against men sprinting on the battlefield.

Through training and dedicated data mining, each sniper figures out how much lead he will need for each speed. We know those calculations off the top of our heads, so in combat we don't need cheat sheets for this type of shot. Though I've been out of the game since 2005, I can still remember my run lead is two and three-quarter mils at three hundred yards. These are things we snipers never forget.

Complex enough? We're only halfway there. Speed is only one part of the equation. The other is the angle of the target's line of movement to your rifle. Let's say our target is running across a street within our field of view. He's moving perpendicular to our sniper team. That's the most acute angle we have to deal with and because of that it will require the most lead. My run lead is two and three-quarter mils at three hundred yards only if the target is moving ninety degrees from me across my field of view.

If your target is moving diagonally from you, or toward you, that requires smaller mil leads. The less acute the angle, the less mils you'll need to get on your target. The lead also changes depending on whether the target is moving toward your rifle or away from it.

In combat, there's no way to tell exactly what the angle of our targets are. This is why training is so crucial. The more we practice, the better we get at guesstimating the angle, and the more accurate we become. We write everything down and memorize it, so that in combat we have instant recall and can calculate our shot placement as accurately as possible.

There's another complication to this equation. Right-handed snipers use their right eye in the scope. Their leads are different if the target is moving left to right versus right to left. The phenomenon is the opposite for left-handed shooters. I've never really figured out why this is the case, but it is a universal truth. Not only does each sniper have to learn the mil lead he needs, but he must to do so for both directions of movement.

Movement speed, angle, and lead all need to be calculated on top of wind, range, weather, and elevation. Once you factor all those elements into the shot, it becomes obvious that tracking and firing at a moving target is one of the most technically demanding types of shots for us snipers. To do it well requires significant investments in training, time, data entry, and memorization. The next time you see a Hollywood film where snipers are smoke-checking running targets left and right, remember all the background math and physics that goes into every trigger pull.

There is one other way to take down a running man; we call it the ambush method. In this scenario, we anticipate the enemy's movement and figure out a point along his projected path that will give us the clearest possible shot at him. Then we place the crosshairs on that point and wait. When our running enemy reaches our mil lead, we pull the trigger. The target literally runs into the shot. It is a slightly easier technique for taking out a moving target, but it can only be done if you know where the enemy is going. If you don't know that, tracking is the only way to kill him.