Saved by Benjamin Hall

Author:Benjamin Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Twelve

The Only Viable Option

Near the Polish-Ukrainian border, early on March 15, Seaspray prepared to start the mission to get me out of Kyiv. He knew well how hazardous the journey from Poland to Kyiv would be. In an earlier operation he’d been on a Ukrainian highway when the Russians bombed it and took it over. He knew that even checkpoints manned by Ukrainians could be dangerous. “You would run into these burn-barrel type checkpoints that were unregulated and not in any comms with the Ukrainian army,” Seaspray says. “It was the kind of thing where whoever the kid who was running the checkpoint was, you know, president of Ukraine for the day.”

What’s more, despite how surprisingly effective the resistance had been, Russian forces were still on the advance everywhere in Ukraine. On March 14, the day we were attacked, Russian rockets killed thirty-five people in western Ukraine, while a Russian missile launched from Donetsk in the east killed twenty more. The most intense assaults of all, against Mariupol in the south, showed no sign of letting up. And Kyiv, the capital, was slowly being encircled and cut off by Russian troops. The situation in Ukraine was bleak and dire, and in Kyiv conditions were more dangerous than ever before.

Seaspray knew all of this and prepared for it. At the SOA safe house, he had two QRF teams—Quick Reaction Force—ready to go: a backup Plan B team led by Dakota Meyer in one ambulance, and the other led by Seaspray. Dr. Rich Jadick would travel in the latter. The two vehicles were stocked and ready to go, and Seaspray laid out the plan.

“Here’s the deal, guys,” he said. “There’s three missing plus two local drivers, and we don’t know where any of them are. But we’re going to go in anyway.”

The key to making it safely to Kyiv, Seaspray believed, was projecting, and never straying from, a completely nonthreatening, de-escalatory presence. In a way, such thinking was counterintuitive. For starters, the two teams would travel in actual ambulances; that was why Seaspray arranged to buy them and not roomier, more comfortable vans. None of the team members would wear any kind of protective clothing, not even body armor, and none would carry visible weapons or high-tech gear. Instead they all wore bright orange jackets with conspicuous medical patches, so that they appeared to be an actual medical team. Their posture would be aggressively deferential, hopefully defusing any tense situation and allowing them ease and speed and safety of movement.

Seaspray believed they had to create a narrative of what was happening, and not let others craft one of their own. “It is about shaping people’s perception of who you are and what you’re doing,” he says. “We’re in bright colors. We’re driving slowly. We’ve got our hands up. No weapons. We’re trying to be as disarming as possible.”

The teams set off and drove across a desolate part of the border, arriving at another safe house inside Ukraine. From there they split off in different directions.

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