The Delta Solution (16 page)

After three minutes, a bigger wave crashed and swept in, and the bow rose up. She swung out bow-to-seaward, and every one of the huge launching party now moved to the stern and pushed like hell. With a swish along the sand, the
Mombassa
was suddenly afloat, and the skiffs alone towed her into deeper water.

Elmi Ahmed jumped aboard from the little boat, and the helmsmen took both skiffs back into the shallows to collect the crew’s personal bags. They also loaded the three semi-drunks, all of whom were sobering up fast, especially Captain Hassan.

Ahmed started the engines and positioned the
Mombassa
a couple hundred yards out. When the skiffs arrived, they were unloaded and then hauled inboard. The ship’s instrument panel glowed in the dark as the crew made ready their sleeping quarters, some on deck, some below. They had three hammocks but the rest were trying to find places for sleeping bags.

At 3:28 a.m., Ahmed gave two short blasts on the ship’s horn and opened the throttles, steering course zero-nine-zero, due east, in search of
the
Queen Beatrix
. At flank speed, 20 knots on their expertly serviced diesel turbine, this meant one full day plus sixteen hours’ running time to reach a point eight hundred miles offshore where they could pick up the giant Dutch tanker. Ismael thought they might find her on radar long before that, especially if she had come to a complete stop, as Mohammed Salat had suggested.

The moon was still high as they covered the first miles of their long journey. In the first two hours they passed only one ship, a medium-sized tanker, riding high in the water, obviously without cargo and headed north up to the gulf to load tens of thousands of tons of crude oil.

The sheer volume of money traversing these waters in the early twenty-first century was breathtaking. And the lion’s share of that money was owned and controlled by the most powerful nations on earth: the US, Russia, China, Japan, the Gulf States, and the big hitters of the European Union.

The simple objective of Ismael Wolde was to ensure that his ravaged nation, withering on the burning east coast of Africa, should, in some small way, share in that wealth.

MACK BEDFORD ELECTED not to relinquish his two-week position of class proctor for the INDOC students as they prepared to enter the full BUDs program. Captain Murphy had given him the option when he was told of the reformation of Delta Platoon.

But Mack had declined, saying he would like to finish his first task on this, his second tour of duty with the SEALs.

And, echoing a phrase he had once said to Mack so many years ago, Bobby Murphy grinned and said, “Ain’t no quit in you, right, son?”

Every morning at 0500, Mack Bedford was at the grinder when the class assembled. When the men were still, and the unspoken ethos of the SEALs was once more settled upon them, Mack began the day.

“Drop,” he said, without expression.

“
DROP!
” responded the class as they hit the concrete and snapped into the correct position, arms extended, bodies straight.

“Push ’em out,” said Mack.

“Push-ups,” shouted the class leader.

Thirty times the guys lowered their bodies to the grinder, and thirty
times they forced themselves back up, arms straight, shoulders throbbing, muscles aching, hearts pounding.

The class leader shouted again: “Instructor Mack!”

“
HOO-YAH, INSTRUCTOR MACK!
” bellowed the class, still balanced on their hands and toes. Still rigid.

“Push ’em out,” said Commander Bedford. The class once more went into the attack, pushing and striving to complete the discipline, trying to get past the throbbing pain barrier. One caved in, stood up, and requested immediate DOR. Without a word or a change of expression, Mack Bedford just nodded and pointed to the bell.

When the second set of thirty had finally been completed, the class, shocked by the severity of the first forty minutes of each day, stayed gasping on the palms of their hands, each man trying in his own way not to betray his pain, praying for the command to stand up and recover.

Mack Bedford left them there for six minutes. Two more men quit with only two minutes left to go, and again Mack just nodded and gestured toward the bell.

On the fourth day he told them they would be taking the five-point BUDs screening test in its entirety that morning. They had already completed sections, but now he wanted to see them put it all together.

The program was by any standards a vicious examination of men, both physically and mentally. It included a five-hundred-yard swim, breast-stroke or sidestroke in twelve minutes and thirty seconds; a minimum of forty-two push-ups in two minutes and fifty sit-ups in two minutes; six dead-hang pull-ups; and a mile-and-a-half run in eleven minutes and thirty seconds wearing boots and pants.

Mack told them after four days this was compulsory. Anyone who could not stay with the program would be ordered to quit. “Most of you won’t be here for much longer anyway,” he said.

Without a word, he joined the class and four of his instructors, swimming powerfully out in front on the opening test in the pool. Then he ripped off sixty push-ups with the rest of them, except he used only one arm. Without even breathing hard, he completed a hundred sit-ups in the two minutes.

Mack completed his daily thirty-eight dead-hang pull-ups. On the mile-and-a-half run, Mack knocked it off in ten minutes, striding easily along the top of the tideline, as he had done for so many years.

Three more men went DOR during these tests, at the end of which Mack said quietly, “Thank you, gentlemen. Push ’em out.”

While the depleted class fought and struggled with the last of their strength, he stood by, making notes in a small black book, logging, he later told the survivors, the guys who were really putting out. The guys who wanted it so badly they would die for it. The future Navy SEALs.

By now it was apparent that the issue of brute strength was critical. And much of that is God-given. You can make a strong guy stronger. Much stronger. But you cannot make a weak guy strong. At least not very often.

The same applies to the issue of speed. Given that everyone who survives Coronado is strong as hell, the honing of speed is probably more important than any other aspect of SEAL training. Because the guys have to be fast in every way, fast over the ground, agile on rough terrain, fast in their thoughts, fast to adapt to setbacks, excellent all-around runners, sprint and distance.

Mack Bedford understood that it’s the issue of speed that truly sorts out a BUDs class. Before he left for his afternoon of surveying potential recruits for Delta Platoon, he issued a stern warning to everyone in the BUDs class.

“I’ll be seeing you again tomorrow morning,” he said. “And I expect by then several more of you will be gone. But just so you understand precisely what you are involved in, I want you all to hear the following:

“This is the most serious business there is. It’s a school for warriors, for men who will, if they are successful, represent the frontline muscle of the armed forces of the United States of America, the true protectors of our people.

“There is no more vital business. Not oil, not mining, not industry. And you must understand the weight of responsibility this profession will force upon you. So if you even suspect you may not want to go all the way, for Christ’s sake get the hell out now, because we do not have time for you.

“We prefer six guys who will lay down their lives for their country and their platoon than fifty whose hearts are somewhere else.”

And with that, Mack Bedford was gone, jogging fast across the dunes, headed for perhaps the most brutal training ground in the world—Coronado’s Obstacle Course, a fifteen-part open-air torture school, a
place so hard on new recruits it is often used by fully fledged SEAL combat teams on their final warm-up before deploying to a war zone.

The O-Course is composed of rope climbs, a sixty-foot cargo net, climbing walls, barbed wire, gymnastic vaults and parallel bars, rope bridges, and places with sinister names like The Weaver. Mack’s class would almost certainly show up there toward the end of the afternoon. But there were three SEAL teams shortly deploying to Afghanistan, and they were scheduled to work there right after lunch.

Mack grabbed a sandwich and then stationed himself right in the middle of the place where he could see and locate SEAL team members with special talents for climbing and agility; men with supreme balance, forearms made of blue twisted steel; men who could scale the side of a big ship that had been commandeered by armed Somali pirates.

After the first SEALs arrived, Mack watched the hardened combat veterans scale the eighty-foot climbing ropes and then slide down, fast but steady. No mistakes. This particular group performed the exercise three times, and of the thirty men who tackled it, Mack noticed just two. They were all outstanding, but these two were very fast, and one of them was, unsurprisingly, the team leader. Mack had no interest in removing him from his platoon just before they went into a theater of war.

The other man was Shane Cannel, a twenty-three-year-old, newly promoted petty officer second class from Orange County, California, surfer, athlete, and guitar player. Specialist: 200 meters, 21.2 seconds. And he could scale those ropes like a six-foot-tall Rhesus monkey.

Mack moved on to the cargo net, where men worked two or three at a time. Here he could make a comparison, and Shane Cannel was just as good in a discipline where everyone was very accomplished, since the net is identical to the one SEALs use to board and disembark ships and submarines.

Young Shane seemed to sense the big rope footholds. He might have been climbing a regular set of stairs. Never faltered. Went straight past both his Team Ten buddies, who were no slouches themselves. Neither of them even looked sideways, and Shane was up and over the big log at the top before the other two had reached the fifty-foot mark.

Guess he always goes by’em like that
, thought Mack, and he wrote down the kid’s name.

Down at the swinging rope bridge, Mack found another young SEAL from the same Alpha Platoon, Team Ten. He was Josh Malone from Iowa, about six feet tall, a farm boy who graduated from Annapolis and served as a gunnery officer on a destroyer.

The swinging bridge makes everyone look bad, especially the big guys whose weight is inclined to swerve the main walking rope. Lt. Josh Malone stepped lightly across it under a full pack, as sure-footed as that character who tightroped over Niagara Falls. Mack had noticed Josh on the cargo net and selected him as the one guy who might have given Shane Cannel a run for his money.

Next stop was the wall, and Mack stood watching for almost an hour as teams of SEALs came thundering into its base, grabbed a rope and tried to walk straight up, a kind of backward rappel.

Watching an expert, it looked dead easy. And to a large extent they were all experts. But just as with most groupings, two out of ten are merely average, four are not bad, two are very good, one is excellent, and one is supreme. It was that last cat for whom Mack was searching, the one with automatic coordination, the one with strength and rhythm, no fear and no doubts about his ability.

All afternoon Mack Bedford checked out that wall, watched dozens of men climb it and drop down the other side. Only one of them caught his eye, a SEAL who was a little older than the others, Chief Petty Officer Brad Charlton from Colorado, a mountain man, climber, skier, son of a coal miner, aged thirty-one. Machine gunner by profession, SEAL Team Two.

Brad went up that wall as if he were merely going uphill, straddled and rolled the top beam and kind of walked at high speed down the other side. Mack followed CPO Charlton down to the rope bridge and witnessed another effortless example of battleground coordination, full pack and rifle, not a foot wrong.

Mack hit the buttons of his cell phone to run an instant check on the CPO and discovered he was a skilled marksman, Honor Man at Sniper School, a decorated veteran who served with distinction in Baghdad, and earmarked for officer training school after his next tour of duty in Helmand Province.

The following morning, Petty Officer Shane Cannel, Lieutenant Josh Malone, and CPO Brad Charlton were all informed they were to continue
their final preparations for deployment with their teams, but they would not be accompanying their platoon to Afghanistan. When their teams began pack-down for their departure, they were to report instead to the newly formed Delta Platoon under the exclusive command of Commander Mackenzie Bedford.

No explanations were given, except an order to observe normal rules involving highly classified operations. And to await further orders from Commander Bedford.