SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden by Chuck Pfarrer

thirty feet long and nine feet wide. Three pairs of eyes and three trigger fingers were fixed on it twenty-four hours a day.
    The sniper cell was run by Master Chief Mel Hoyle, a huge, shambling bear of a man with a slow walk and a West Virginia drawl. Mel is a twenty-five-year veteran of the SEALs; for nineteen of those years he has been an operator at Six, first as a “door kicker” on an assault team, where he helped to capture Abu Abbas. He was then selected for sniper training with the British Special Air Service. Mel is a prickly, exacting man, with a reputation for telling it like it is; he is also very seldom wrong. Since the jump, Mel had supervised the deployment of the sniper team members, those rotating through the TACTAS room, and a pair on five-minute standby with a Seahawk helicopter aboard USS Boxer . Mel and his leading petty officer, John Hall, filled in on all the slots, taking their own turns behind rifle scopes, in addition to standing six-hour desk watches in the TOC. Mel was big, but no one ever saw him eat; as far as his teammates could tell, he ran on caffeine and nicotine. He constantly had a cup of coffee in hand and a dip of Copenhagen snuff packed into his lower lip. In the last five days Mel had racked up maybe ten hours of sleep, most of that on the rolling deck in the TACTAS room.
    In the Navy it’s said that an officer can never do anything that a chief hasn’t already figured out, and as Greg Wilson and Frank Costello came out of their meeting in the stateroom, Mel walked into the TOC. He could read the skipper’s face. It was now 17:45, on Easter Sunday, daylight was over, and there would be approximately twenty-four minutes of nautical twilight before full dark.
    Mel Hoyle reported that since the surrender of Abduwali Muse the bad guys were prairie dogging, sticking their heads up through the forward hatch and peering over the top of the pilothouse. They’d started to transmit on the bridge-to-bridge radio; channel thirteen crackled with the voice of subject Delta, Ghadi. What he said was largely unintelligible, a couple of words of pissed-off, broken English, and Abduwali’s name spoken again and again like a tape loop.
    “They want their playmate back,” Wilson said.
    “They aren’t going to get him,” Mel said calmly.
    Overhead on the command set, the lifeboat was projected on half a dozen monitors from as many angles. Someone was standing in the forward hatch, and shapes, human shapes, flitted by the pilothouse windows. The light was fading quickly, and a layer of high clouds covered the stars. The moon was nearly full, for the last four nights it lit the sea like a parking lot—but tonight it would not rise until 8:00 p.m.
    That gave the team two hours of near perfect, murky darkness.
    Wilson, Costello, and Mel stood and watched the screens. On one roll, they could see directly into the pilothouse. Two men were standing close to each other, gesticulating, obviously arguing. As they watched one of them scooted out and peered through the back hatch. The head in the bow hatch ducked for a moment, then popped back up.
    Wilson said, “How’s your view back there?”
    “We own them, skipper,” Mel said. “We own them.”
    “The sea state is building. It’ll be force three by 2200,” Costello said. “The swell’s already coming up.”
    The ship was stable, the swell and the wind were not huge, but they all could occasionally feel the deck rise under their feet. It had been calm for several days, but it would not stay calm forever. Nor was their situation open-ended.
    Wilson sat on an edge of the wardroom table and crossed his legs. His hands gripped the edges and he looked at the lifeboat and the positions of the other assets. He’d been awake himself for the best part of a week, living like Mel on caffeine but without the speedy benefits of Copenhagen. Wilson made himself think slowly, burning the position of all his teams into his mind, forming a perfect