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

swamping and sinking the pirates’ speedboat. Belowdecks, Perry took control of the ship’s systems, rendering the bridge controls useless.
    At the risk of their own lives, Perry and his gang were able to disarm and capture one of the pirates—seizing his weapon. After a tense standoff, Perry offered a trade: Give us our captain, and we’ll give you back your pirate. The pirates pretended to agree, and then pulled a double cross—as they were being shown how to launch a motor lifeboat, they pushed their captive, Captain Richard Phillips, inside the boat and fled, setting off an epic, globe-spanning special operation.
    Within hours the destroyer USS Bainbridge and the carrier USS Boxer surrounded the pirates and their captive. Negotiations started immediately over the lifeboat’s radio. The pirates had no idea that SEAL Team Six had parachuted an entire assault element into the shark-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden, and put a team of snipers onto Bainbridge .
    Beyond USS Boxer lurked a pair of SEAL Team Six deadly high-speed assault craft. Invisible to surface radar, armed with chain guns, automatic grenade launchers, and capable of forty knots, these boats were the SEALs’ knockout punch. Also parachuted onto the Bainbridge was another SEAL Team Six secret weapon, a mobile tactical operations center (TOC), manned by a platoon of non-SEAL überdweebs assigned to Team Six. The Navy called them Support Detachment Alpha, but to the shooters they were “the Twidgets,” geeks on steroids. The TOC was their Super Bowl. They quickly established communications with Washington and with a Seawolf-class submarine trailing the lifeboat at a depth of three hundred feet. These same men would prove invaluable during Operation Neptune’s Spear.
    Battlefield information, however exquisite, does not exist in a vacuum, and flickering on a separate set of fourteen-inch screens was a slice of the real world: the network news feeds from Fox, CNN, the Reuters wire service, and the BBC Web page.
    Det Alpha set up shop in the Bainbridge ’s wardroom, running a parallel and complimentary operation to the Command Information Center on the destroyer’s bridge. Captain Greg Wilson, the commanding officer of SEAL Team Six, was the on-scene commander, and though he was riding Commander Frank Costello’s ship, eating his chow, and borrowing his bunk, Greg Wilson’s command wire went straight to Vice Admiral Bill McCraven at the Joint Special Operations Command. From JSOC, by one remove, Wilson’s orders came from National Command Authority—the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president.
    The situation was deteriorating. A day into the hostage taking, Captain Phillips had taken a chance and tried to swim away—but was recaptured by the pirates. On the morning of the eleventh, pirates had fired shots at a frigate, the USS Halyburton .
    As the winds and seas picked up, negotiators aboard Bainbridge persuaded the pirates to accept a towline from Bainbridge . The SEALs waited. Almost two days passed before a decision came down from President Obama, and when it did it was excruciatingly vague. The SEALs and the crew of Bainbridge were authorized to take action if they deemed that the hostage’s life was in immediate danger. It was a political shrug. Succeed, and you’ll be heroes. Mess up, and we’ll disavow that you were given any orders to act.
    The SEALs kept the lifeboat under constant twenty-four-hour surveillance with video and thermal imagery. In the intel feed from the boat they were identified as Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta. Subject Charlie—the pirate named Nadif—did the most talking. Bravo, Erasto, did the least. Subject Delta, Ghadi, had a high-pitched, nasal voice. He bitched about everything.
    The pirates agreed to accept a transfer of food and water, and one of them, Subject Alpha, Abduwali Muse, took the opportunity to come aboard Bainbridge to “negotiate.” As soon as he was aboard the American destroyer Muse