The Way Forward by Robert O'Neill

Author:Robert O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

8

Choose to Connect

ROB

Don’t Shoot the Sleeping Man

I didn’t see Osama bin Laden right away. My night-vision goggles cast the stairwell of the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in amber light as I crept up to the third floor behind my point man. Just before we entered the building through the open carport, the lights had winked out in the building and throughout Abbottabad, snuffed out by God or the CIA. Whoever got there first. In the darkness, about half of the assault team had entered the building and eight SEAL Team xxx operators from the squadron started up the stairs, surveilling the interior through the eerie luminescence of their goggles. I was near the back of the procession as it moved up the stairs to the second floor. The first floor had been cleared quickly before I got there, so I had a front-row seat to watch cool guys do cool stuff. Two by two, the operators had peeled off to secure rooms once we got to the final set of stairs to the third floor. Now there were just two of us: my point man and me.

Just before I got there, there was a flicker of movement behind a curtain, and the point man fired up at it. We paused on the stairs, momentarily uncertain of whether the two of us should advance alone. I squeezed the point man’s shoulder, and we moved quickly up the last steps. The point man swept the fabric aside. Two women on the other side screamed. My point man lunged toward them and pushed them out of the way, acting as a human shield in case they were wearing suicide vests. I swiveled to the right through an open doorway.

As I pivoted into the doorway, I could see Osama bin Laden standing in the dark bedroom at the foot of a bed, a glowing presence in the ghostly hue of my goggles. He wore a robe and was taller and leaner than I expected. He was also older and grayer than in the pictures from a decade earlier, but he had the same mournful face and long nose. He was standing behind one of his wives, Amal, nearly looming over her. I don’t know if he was using her for a shield or something else, but it didn’t matter. I shot him twice over her shoulder. One of the shots split open his head. After he fell to the floor, I shot him one more time and heard him take his last breath, saw his tongue loll out of his mouth. I could smell the inside of his skull, like the funky odor of an animal’s entrails.

Amal had been shot in the leg somehow, and as I helped her to the bed alongside the wall, I noticed a boy standing in the dark, looking up at me. It was bin Laden’s son, Hussein. He was two years old, I found out later.

I picked him up as gently as I could and put him on the bed next to Amal.

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