“Roger that, Mako One. Move it!”
The Chinook descended, its ramp once more awash.
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.”
