Against All Enemies

29 THE ONLY EASY DAY

Moore heaved himself up and into the black Zodiac to join the other two SEALs who’d jumped from the platform. They were still waiting on Carmichael and one of his guys, Mako Six, who’d been hit. Moore tugged off his mask and took in a long breath of the salty air. Out to the west, across the charcoal-colored waves and beneath a mantle of clouds, hovered the CH-47 Chinook helicopter, it’s rear ramp lowered, its pilot perched precariously over the water. The tandem rotors created a wash that lifted high into the night and drew a pale white vortex over the gulf, while the chopper’s turboshaft engines roared. That pilot, Moore knew, was battling fiercely against the wind.

An onslaught of small-arms fire erupted from the platform, most of it directed at the chopper itself, while Moore was on the radio, trying to call in fire support from the patrol ship; however, the request was denied and he was ordered to extract immediately.

The chopper pilot echoed those orders: “Mako One, this is Seabird, taking fire, taking fire! Need you out of there NOW, over!”

“Roger that, Seabird. Roger that!”

The Chinook’s fuselage came alive with the flashes of ricocheting rounds that were quickly lost in the mist. Moore turned back toward the platform and saw Carmichael at the railing with Electronics Technician First Class Billy Hartogg, Mako Six.

“Frank, we’re running out of time here, buddy!” Moore reminded his friend.

But Frank Carmichael understood that in life or in death no man should be left behind. He and Moore had learned firsthand that that wasn’t some jingoistic cliché uttered in war movies. It was truth, and Carmichael’s actions reflected the kind of steel he had in his back and the quality of his character. He picked up the lifeless form of Electronics Technician First Class Hartogg and was determined to bring the SEAL home.

SEALs like Carmichael did not take the easy way out, not during INDOC, not during BUD/S, not anytime. The only easy day was yesterday. However, before Carmichael could make it over the edge, gunfire ripped across the railing, pinging and sparking, driving him back and away.

And then more salvos punched into the water between the Zodiac and the platform, and Moore found himself looking up into the eyes of two guardsmen, now leveling their rifles on him.

Gunfire boomed from behind him as his men lifted their own rifles and took out the two Iraqis, who fell back and out of sight onto the platform.

A loud splash stole Moore’s attention. Carmichael and their fallen colleague had dropped ten meters off the platform and had hit the waves—

But they were on the other side, near one of the largest pilings, some twenty meters away.

A hand rose above the waves …and a voice that was only in Moore’s mind echoed: “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”

“We have to go back!” shouted Gary Brand, the platoon’s leading petty officer, seated in the Zodiac beside Moore.

Moore looked at Carmichael, then back at the helicopter.

“Mako One, this is Seabird! I cannot wait for you any longer!”

Moore cursed and shook his head. “You wait for me! You will wait!”

“Damn you, Mako One!” cried the pilot. “Thirty seconds!”

The gurgling outboard that had been resting in idle wailed as Moore speeded off after Carmichael, telling his men to get ready on the rope.

Moore then took a deep breath and held it.

All Carmichael had to do was catch the line and slide the loop up his arm. They’d drag his ass onto the Zodiac if it was the last thing Moore did.

He steered them closer to Carmichael, who was trying to hang on to Hartogg’s body. They motored up beside him—

The rope went out.

Carmichael had only one good arm to make the catch.

He missed. Shit!

Moore turned the boat so tightly that it felt as though the craft were on rails. He believed he had time for another pass. Then he looked back at the Chinook.

Seabird was beginning to pull away.

And suddenly seconds were years. There was no noise save for Moore’s heartbeat, no sensation save for salt water in his mouth.

Carmichael bobbed up and down near the piling.

The chopper’s ramp sent a waterfall back into the gulf as the pilot throttled up.

“Don’t you remember the quote they told us?” Carmichael had asked. “We can only be beaten in two ways: We either die or we give up. And we’re not giving up.”

A fresh volley of fire wrenched Moore out of his daze and sent his gaze back to the chopper. “He’s taking off! We have to go!”

He wasn’t sure who replied, the voice distorted by the wind, the gunfire, the rotor wash, but he heard enough: “Don’t do this, Max! Don’t do it!”

But he realized in that moment that he couldn’t save them all. Not all of them. Not Carmichael. “No choice. We’re leaving!”

When he looked back at the platform, Carmichael was still there, waving not for help but signaling for them to go.

Save yourselves.

Gunfire ripped across the side of the Zodiac, and that was it. Moore wheeled the boat around once more and throttled up the outboard, sending them skipping across the wave tops and toward the chopper.

“Seabird, this is Mako One. We’re on our way!”

“Roger that, Mako One. Move it!”

The Chinook descended, its ramp once more awash.

“Don’t leave me!”

But Carmichael had never shouted that. He’d urged them to leave. He knew he must remain behind.

Moore took the boat at full throttle toward the Chinook, whose pilot now descended a few more feet, the ramp perfectly aligned, the incoming fire still pinging all around them, until—

The Zodiac, under Moore’s determined guidance, streaked right up the ramp and came to a skidding, colliding halt inside the chopper.

Before Moore could even throttle down, the Chinook’s pilot pitched the bird up, and they thundered away from the platform, leaving the waves and incoming gunfire behind.

After switching off the engine, Moore sat there. When he looked up, it was into the eyes of his fellow SEALs, all staring at him, as though waiting for an excuse, something they could cling to that would justify what had just happened. We left a man in the water to die.

But all Moore could do was close his eyes, look away, and stiffen against a breakdown.

And then his men went back to work, tugging off their gear, now back in the groove, as though nothing had ever happened. The training had kicked in, the countless hours of training, of routine, of not even remembering they’d finished the mission and had packed up the gear and somehow had made it to the bar and were already on their third round. The blur. The fog. The blinding intensity of combat sapping away senses that would return in time.

Within two hours the single largest operation in the history of the U.S. Navy SEALs was launched. Much to Moore’s frustration, his team had been held back in reserve.

SEALs, along with Royal Marines, had attacked the pumping locks for each terminal and platform; however, intel had failed to note the concertina wire surrounding those locks, so SEALs got caught up in that obstacle and took fire from the platform’s garrison until they were able to secure the area. Not soon after, they took fire from an Iraqi armored vehicle, but their embedded Air Force Combat Controller had been able to call up an Air Force A-10 Warthog whose Weapons System Officer summarily identified and destroyed the vehicle with a 670-pound AGM-65 Maverick air-to-surface missile.

Still more assaults were launched by SEALs on the refinery and port on the Al-Faw peninsula, while U.S. Marines from the 5th Regimental Combat Team of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force attacked targets farther north in the Rumaila oil fields. Moore had listened to his commander complain that the ground looked unstable out there, too unstable for their standard rear-wheel-drive Desert Patrol Vehicles (DPVs). The SEALs’ fears were confirmed when they arrived and their DPVs became trapped in desert sand soaked with oil. They’d been forced to move out on foot to face more than three hundred entrenched Iraqi solders and armored vehicles. With the assistance of close air support called in by their combat controllers, the SEAL teams battled their way through the enemy positions until dawn, killing several hundred Iraqis, capturing nearly one hundred more, and destroying all of their armored vehicles until they were relieved by the 42 Commando of the British Royal Marines.

Following the operation, Carmichael’s body was recovered. He’d been shot by the Iraqis on the platform and bitten by yellow-bellied sea snakes that had been stirred up by the outboard motor’s wash. The snakes were common to the gulf, their venom more toxic than that of the cobra or the krait, paralyzing the victim’s respiratory system. Hartogg’s body had also been recovered, although he had drifted nearly a quarter-mile away from the platform.

At Carmichael’s funeral in San Diego, Moore, along with more than thirty other SEALs who knew Carmichael and had served with him, lined up on both sides of the pallbearers’ path, with the coffin emerging from the hearse and carried between them. As the coffin passed each SEAL, he removed the golden Trident, aka “Budweiser,” from his uniform. With the Trident’s heavy pin sticking out from the bottom, he slapped the pin onto the coffin, embedding it in the wood. One by one, as the pallbearers waited, the SEALs plunged their Tridents into Carmichael’s casket so that by the time it reached the grave site, a pair of golden inlays had been drawn across each side. This was the least Moore and his colleagues could do — a final tribute to one of their brothers.

Moore, being Carmichael’s closest and best friend, was last to drive home his pin, and that had been too much. He’d broken down for just a few seconds, but the stoic faces born of the extreme discipline of his peers motivated him to hang on. He would get through this. He looked to Frank’s young wife, Laney, now the widow, sobbing into her tissue, her black mascara running across her cheeks, as dark as her dress. Telling her he was sorry was a joke, a terribly bad joke. She had lost her husband because of him. The frustration of being unable to help was maddening, and he balled his hands into fists.

A few hours later at the wake, held at a big Italian restaurant called Anthony’s, Moore took Laney aside and tried to explain to her what had happened. She’d been told only a very broad-stroke account of the incident, and nowhere in the report did it say that Moore had made the decision to leave Carmichael and take the rest of the team back to the helicopter, only that the SEALs had taken heavy fire and Carmichael had been killed.

“The truth is, Laney, it’s all my fault.”

She shook her head and pushed him away. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to know. Nothing will change. I’m not stupid, Max. I knew this was a possibility, so don’t think I’m some poor and shocked widow and try to give me someone to blame. You can apologize if it makes you feel better, but you don’t have to. I took on the responsibility of marrying a Navy SEAL, and I’d be a goddamned fool if I didn’t think this day might come. You know what’s weird? When you guys were last deployed, I had this feeling …I just knew …”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Frank died doing what he loved. And he loved you guys. It was his life. That’s the way we’ll remember him.”

“But he didn’t have to die. And I just …I wouldn’t even be here if …”

“I told you — no apologies.”

“I know, but—”

“Then just forget it.”

“Laney, I don’t expect you to forgive me.” Moore choked up. “I just …There wasn’t …He tried to tell me to go …”

“Stop it. Don’t say anything else.”

“But I have to.”

She put a finger to his lips. “No. You don’t.”

Moore abruptly turned away and rushed out of the restaurant, feeling the gazes of every other SEAL burn into the back of his head.

“Just five,” whispered Ansara as he stared through his binoculars. He was lying on his belly, shoulder to shoulder with Moore, who confirmed the same from behind his own binoculars.

In a clearing about fifteen meters below, five Hispanic men were loading a fourteen-foot-long nondescript truck with brick after brick of dried marijuana. Ansara had already given Moore the tour of a place he called “the garden,” where beneath the extensive cover of sugar pines the cartel had established a sophisticated growing operation whose expansive and clever irrigation system left Moore stunned. He had witnessed the growers’ tents, and the other much larger and longer tents where the harvested plants were hung from twine and carefully dried over a three- to four-day period, with the growers carefully checking each plant to be sure it had not contracted any mold. Once dried, the bundled plants were moved to yet another tent, where a team of sixteen women (Moore had counted them, and some appeared as young as fifteen or sixteen) did the weighing, bundling, and taping of each brick. They’d left the tent’s side flaps open, and through those openings Moore had been able to photograph the entire operation, itself under surveillance by a collection of battery-operated cameras mounted within and around the tents. Ansara, who’d already performed excellent reconnaissance of the operation, knew every guard post, and every weak section in the farm’s defenses.

“I wanted to bust these guys the last time I was up here, but the Bureau wouldn’t have it,” he’d told Moore. “Probably the right decision.”

“Yeah, because in a week they’d set up another shop. We need to shut them down back in Mexico and break the chain of command.”

“Why is it all you ex-military boys talk about the tactics, techniques, and procedures and refer to a bunch of drug dealers as having a ‘chain of command’?”

“Because we’re not ex-military. We are always military. And because that’s exactly what it is.”

“I’m just busting your balls.”

Moore smiled as he remembered the conversation and now glanced back at the laser trip wire they’d marked with a small piece of duct tape on each tree. Those were the areas through which they could not pass, and Ansara had twice prevented Moore from slipping up and breaking a beam. He’d taken a little baby powder between his fingers to show Moore exactly where the laser traversed, dusting the beam ever so slightly with the powder.

A camera mounted on top of the tent from within which the men were moving the bricks panned toward the hill, then tilted up, toward Moore and Ansara, who dug deeper behind the log they were using for cover. At that precise moment, footfalls and the crunching of leaves came from behind them, the southeast. Guards on patrol. Voices. Spanish. Something about bear tracks.

Bears? Not good.

Ansara gestured to him. Wait. They’ll pass.

The men below finished their loading, and just three of them climbed into the truck’s cab, and the driver started the engine.

Moore and Ansara needed to get back down into the valley, where they’d retrieve their full-suspension mountain bikes and ride soundlessly down to the main roads to their 4x4 pickup truck. The cartel truck would have a significant lead on them, but it would be tracked by satellite, those feeds piped directly to Moore’s smartphone. Somewhere along the line Moore would need to get close, to plant a GPS tracker on the vehicle, which would provide more accurate data on the truck’s location. The satellite feeds were often interrupted by the weather and terrain, and this was one truck they did not want to lose.

Once the voices of the guards grew faint, Ansara led the way through knots of pines and across the beds of needles crackling under their boots. It was 11:35 a.m.

By the time they reached their bikes, they heard the truck lumbering slowly down the dirt road, a single narrow path that had been cleared by cartel workers and lying about twenty meters east of their location. Ansara mounted his bike and took off. He was an experienced bike handler, having trained extensively with his buddy Dave Ameno, who’d taught him to navigate some of Central Florida’s most technical trails. Ansara’s skills annoyed Moore, who could barely stay on his wheels as he leapt over roots and made small jumps. Ansara knew exactly when to come out of the saddle and throw his weight back, while Moore got thrown around on the bike like a rag doll whose wrists had been duct-taped to the handlebars.

That Moore fell only twice before they reached their truck was sheer luck. That he hadn’t broken anything or drawn blood was the miracle they needed. They threw their bikes in the back of the pickup and took off, heading southwest down Sierra Drive, with Moore studying the map and the superimposed blue blip that represented the truck.

“How far up are they?” Ansara asked.

“Three-point-four-five miles.”

The FBI agent nodded. “Remind me when this is all over to teach you how to ride a mountain bike. I can see that wasn’t part of your extensive training.”

“Hey, I made it.”

“Yeah, but you looked real tentative through those whoop-de-doos. I told you to relax and let the bike tell you where it wants to go.”

“I don’t speak bike.”

“Obviously.”

“The bike wanted to go in the trees.”

“You must become one with the machine, grasshopper.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Ansara laughed. “Hey, you got a girlfriend?”

He grinned crookedly at the man. “You always talk this much?”

“Hey, we’re following a truck.”

“That’s right. So let’s stay on it. Signal’s still good. Any speculation on their first stop?”

“Well, if they get onto 198, then I’m thinking Porterville. There’s been some trafficking through there before. DEA scored big a couple of years ago, I think.”

Moore was about to broaden his view of the map when he turned to Ansara and said, “And to answer your question, I don’t have a girlfriend. I was with a very nice lady in Afghanistan, but I’m not sure when I’ll ever get back.”

“A local?”

“Oh, that would go over well, eh? They’d string me up by my you-know-whats, so no, she’s an American. She works for the U.S. Embassy.”

“She hot?”

Moore grinned. “No.”

“Too bad.” Ansara’s cell phone rang. “Oh, this is a call I need to take.”

“Who?”

“Rueben. The kid I recruited. What do you have for me, young man?”

Moore picked up only bits and pieces of the kid’s voice on the other end, but Ansara’s reaction filled in the blanks: The cartel had completed some kind of extensive tunnel running between Mexicali and Calexico. Rueben was one of about ten young men who were going to begin making major shipments through the tunnels, probably cocaine from Colombia and opium from Afghanistan. This was a brand-new avenue of approach for the cartel, and after the call, Ansara said that the mules had already made several dry runs. Now they felt certain the passageway was clean and undetected, thus the real product would begin moving north, while the money and weapons flowed south.

The cartel truck moved at no more than forty-five miles per hour through the winding roads, and Ansara’s guess had been right. They’d driven directly into the small town of Porterville, California, population about fifty thousand, and headed straight for the Holiday Inn Express, where they parked in a space behind the three-story building.

Moore and Ansara watched them from the parking lot of the Burger King across the street. All three men remained in the cab, nixing Moore’s plan to affix his GPS tracker to the underside of the vehicle. They dared not get any closer.

“You want a cheeseburger?” asked Ansara.

Moore looked at him in mock disgust. “Well, the In-N-Out Burger is the best burger on the West Coast, in my humble opinion, because it is one hundred percent pure beef. And their fries are cooked in one hundred percent pure cholesterol-free vegetable oil.”

“Are you serious? You want a burger or not?”

“Get me two.”

And by the time Ansara returned with their food, another vehicle had pulled up beside the cartel truck. This second one was a white cargo van with tinted windows.

Staring through the long lenses of his digital surveillance camera, Moore nearly choked on his cheeseburger as he watched the men transfer at least forty cinder-block-size bricks from the cartel truck to the van — in broad daylight.

The driver of the van, another Hispanic man wearing a denim jacket and sunglasses, handed the cartel men a backpack, assumedly bulging with cash.

“I can’t believe they’re this bold.”

“Believe it,” answered Ansara. “Hi, there. Here are your drugs. Thanks for the money. Have a nice day.”

The van left, and while the Agency would track it via satellite and Moore’s photographs of its tag number, intercepting it might result in a call back to the cartel guys in the truck, who would panic and not complete their distribution, so the van would be left alone. The truck pulled out of the parking lot and headed west, back out toward 65. Ansara kept well behind them, and by the time they merged onto the highway, heading south, the cartel truck had a two-mile lead.

“So this girlfriend of yours,” Ansara said out of nowhere. “You still talking to her?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t have much luck with women.”

“Because of this.”

“The job? Hell, yeah …”

“Well, I’m the wrong guy to ask for advice.”

Ansara cracked a grin. “Maybe one day I’ll find a guy who knows how to do it. I’d forgotten you were a SEAL, so that pretty much dooms you.”

“Hey, I knew some guys with families.”

“They’re the exception, not the rule. Women nowadays want too much. I think some think we’re selfish for spending so much time away. When I was in the ’Stan, I didn’t know anyone on any of the ODA teams who wasn’t either single, divorced, or going through a divorce. It was kind of pathetic.”

“I’d forgotten you were Special Forces. I thought you were just an ex — mountain biker looking for fame and fortune.”

“Yeah, that’s why I joined the FBI — so I could work ridiculous hours and get underpaid while people try to kill me …”

“You love it.”

“Every minute.”

Moore glanced down at the map. “Hey, bro. They stopped. Gas station. Near Delano.”

“Could be just to refuel — but if it’s another exchange, we need to boogie, otherwise we could miss it.”

Moore was about to zoom in on the image when the satellite feed froze up. “Shit. Lost the signal.”