Free KBL by John Weisman

when the draft was abolished—but also cultural. This president, Hansen had noted with increasing disappointment over the past twenty-four months, was virtually tone-deaf when it came to dealing with the military, military personnel, or military issues.
    Which was why, even though Hansen was personally opposed to a direct assault on the Abbottabad compound, there was no way he was going to argue the case in this venue. He had already discussed the matter with Mercaldi, and they were agreed on one critical item: the Abbottabad mission would never be anything but capture/kill. With emphasis on the kill. Precisely how the mission would be executed, and how the president would be presented with their decision—and convinced to approve it—would be worked out at a later date.
    Wes Bolin also knew of the secretary’s negative view about a possible assault on the Abbottabad compound. He had spent most of the early afternoon discussing Hansen’s opposition with Mercaldi. That was one of the primary reasons the D/CIA had insisted that Bolin accompany him to the White House. He wanted the SECDEF to see Bolin in action, and also allow the SEAL admiral to get a read on the secretary. The D/CIA’s advice was classic Vince. He’d advised the former Navy linebacker, “Know your adversaries, and prepare for every possibility.”
    Which is exactly what Slam Bolin had been doing since before January. At Mercaldi’s invitation, on New Year’s Day he had assigned Captain Larry Bailey, one of his senior JSOC SEALs, as his personal liaison to CIA’s Bin Laden Group and sent him off to Langley. By then he had already replaced the National Security Council’s JSOC special warfare liaison, an Army lieutenant colonel, with a SEAL rear admiral. And he’d had elements of his Tier One units—Delta, DEVGRU, and the 75th Ranger Regiment’s Strike Force—training for an assault on UBL’s Abbottabad compound within days of CIA’s setting up Valhalla Base.
    The troops just didn’t know it.

7

    Dam Neck, Virginia
January 12, 2011, 0730 Hours Local Time
    Troy Roberts loved to work the shoot houses. Which was a good thing, because now that he was back from Purgatory, he was spending a lot of time in them. He knew it was a cliché, but he still loved the smell of gunpowder, the adrenaline rush of shooting on the move, the unit integrity that came from knowing—really knowing —where every member of your team was every millisecond of the scenario, and the satisfaction of putting his rounds exactly, precisely where he wanted them to go.
    Another reason he loved working in shoot houses was that they gave him—and the rest of his six-man assault element from Charlie Troop—the chance to practice over and over and over again the intricate, complex, sometimes problematical choreography of snatch and grab and capture/kill executed at close quarters, under high stress, and always contrapuntally against unforeseen events and the omnipresent Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s Law.
    Because despite all the hours of rehearsals, all the force-on-force scenarios, all the endless repetitions that every man in DEVGRU was responsible for doing, Troy and his shipmates understood—because they’d been there—that no matter how well prepared you were, no matter how many times you’d rehearsed the scenario, no matter how much you honed your body and your mind and prepped your gear, in the real world Murphy’s Laws of Combat always apply. Troy’s favorite was Murphy’s original law: What can go wrong, will go wrong. But he was also a firm believer in a few of the others. He understood that no op-plan ever survives initial contact, that five-second fuses always burn just three seconds, and that if your attack is going perfectly, it’s an ambush.
    And there was the one Murphy’s Law of Combat that, at least to Troy, summarized much of the thinking behind special operations: If it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid .
     
    The shoot houses at Dam Neck, much