13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi (38 page)

Oz heard someone coming up the ladder and looked over to see the outline of a man climbing over the parapet next to Ubben. The man exchanged a few words with the DS agent, and Ubben pointed toward Oz and Rone. Glen walked across the rooftop to the northwest corner, flashing his smile at Rone. The two former SEALs shook hands then pulled each other close for a chest-bumping, arm-around-the-back man hug.

Rone introduced Glen to Oz. “Glen’s a sniper, too,” Rone said. “We need another good shooter up here.”

“Well, hopefully we don’t need you,” Oz told Glen as they shook hands.

After some small talk, Glen turned to walk south across the roof, to look out over the building’s front door. Rone and Oz shifted their attention back north toward Zombieland.

Then everything changed.

A rocket-propelled grenade or a mortar slammed outside the Annex’s north wall, exploding in almost a direct line from where Rone and Oz stood. Immediately shots flew at the men on Building C from unseen gunmen hiding in Zombieland. Rone never hesitated. He opened up full bore with the machine gun, swiveling his powerful upper body left and right, flooding bullets and tracers into the attackers’ positions. He lay down a withering base of fire, in repeated bursts of five to seven rounds, methodically and lethally shooting across the open area beyond the north wall. If the attackers had thought they’d catch the Americans sleeping at dawn, Rone let them know he was wide awake and ready to fight.

The relentless automatic fire of Rone’s gun echoed in Oz’s gauze-filled ears,
da-da-da-da-da
,
da-da-da-da-da
. Oz had responded as quickly as Rone, blasting their enemies with steady fire from his assault rifle. He couldn’t see the attackers, so he aimed wherever he saw muzzle flashes. Pinpoints of light soon shone from bullet holes in a metal Quonset hut in their line of fire. Rone and Oz kept firing.

Then came a second explosion. A mortar landed almost directly atop the north wall, perhaps thirty feet in front of Dave Ubben’s post.

“I’m hit!” Ubben yelled. “I’m hit!”

Between shots, Oz glanced to the right and saw the wounded DS agent sitting on the wooden box they used as
a step from the roof over the parapet to the ladder. Ubben had his back to Zombieland, his hands pressed to his head. He didn’t look critically wounded, so Oz resolved to help him as soon as the shooting stopped.

After a radio call ordered all State Department staffers to assemble for evacuation, Jack walked the DS agent to the ladder on Building D, intending to bid him goodbye. The DS agent had stripped off some of his heavy gear, so Jack helped by carrying it to the ladder. The DS agent swung himself over from the roof onto the highest rungs, and Jack reached out with his gear.

At that moment, the first explosion and shock wave rocked the Annex. Jack was about fifty yards away, and he felt and heard the blast almost as strongly as the men on Building C. A black plume of smoke rose from where the explosion hit. The DS agent scrambled down the ladder at the northeastern corner of Building D, while Jack tried to figure out what was happening.
It could have been an RPG
, he thought.
Or maybe somebody put an explosive next to the northern wall, to breach it and get in here from Zombieland.

Jack looked to his right, to the roof of Building C. He saw Rone and Oz rocking and rolling, shooting hard into the dirt alleyway that cut north through Zombieland. Jack couldn’t see the enemy, but he raised his assault rifle and fired in the same direction, adding his gun to the fight. Jack directed his fire by following Rone’s tracer rounds, but soon stopped when he didn’t see a clear target.

The second explosion came less than thirty seconds after the first, different and more powerful. Jack recognized
that this was unlike the previous two firefights at the Annex. After two thwarted assaults on the Annex from the east with gelatina bombs and AK-47s, the attackers had changed tactics, improved their planning, and increased their firepower. The second bomb’s detonation, so close to the first explosion and accompanied by waves of rifle fire from the north part of Zombieland, also suggested a spike in military sophistication and an unsettling level of precision and coordination.

Jack saw and heard the second explosion when it hit atop the Annex wall, followed by a shock wave and black smoke. He saw Rone and Oz still firing into Zombieland. But Jack wanted a better view before he resumed shooting, so he held his fire. The cause of the second explosion didn’t immediately register with Jack.

Then his radio crackled and an explanation became clear. One of his fellow operators yelled: “Mortars!”

When Tanto first called out “Incoming?” he did so as a question, because he wasn’t sure what he’d heard. Although he’d picked up a disturbing sound in the distance, Tanto thought it might have been caused by something as innocent as one of his fellow operators stepping on a sealed bag of Fritos.

In Iraq, Tanto had grown used to the
shush
or
whoosh
sounds of rockets being fired, and to the
clunk
of mortars being dropped into tubes for launching. Although Tanto had heard something like a
whoosh
, with his compromised hearing it didn’t sound like anything he’d heard before in combat.

Still, the sound made him flinch and take a knee on the Building A rooftop. When the shell hit, perhaps twenty
seconds after he first heard the
whoosh
, Tanto turned toward Building C and saw the men on the roof engaging the enemy. Their guns sounded like buzz saws cutting through cordwood. He moved to the northern edge of the Building A roof, found a clear line of sight into Zombieland, and added another gun to the battle. But after only a few bursts he stopped.

Wait a second
, Tanto thought.
If that was us, we would fire mortars to set up an assault. And if they’re going to assault, it’s going to come from the field to the south that I’m supposed to be watching.

He spun around and positioned himself to look out over the south wall. Tanto saw the ten-car militia motorcade speed away from the Annex to points unknown. He hoped that some were trying to locate the source of the mortars, but he considered it just as likely that most or all were fleeing.
Like cockroaches when you turn on the light
, Tanto thought.

Then came another
whoosh
. Even with his damaged ears, before the second explosion Tanto knew what was happening. Someone came over the radio and asked if they were under attack by RPGs. “No, it was a mortar!” Tanto said. When the questioner repeated the inquiry, Tanto came across the radio again, loud and clear:

“Mortars! MORTARS!
MORTARS!!
”

On Building C, after the second explosion Oz dropped down below the lip of the parapet, to replace the spent magazine on his assault rifle. As they’d planned, Rone never hesitated. He remained upright and fully engaged, increasing his rate of fire to mask the temporary loss of Oz’s gun.

Rone gripped the black machine gun with his meaty hands, holding the butt hard against his shoulder. With a deafening growl, the weapon ingested belt-fed rounds and spewed them with deadly intent into Zombieland. Rone’s thick biceps flexed as he moved left and right. Bullets and white smoke poured from the barrel. Rone kept shooting as Oz reloaded, defending the men on the buildings and towers to his left, right, and rear, protecting the men and women below his feet inside Building C. Exposing himself to fire, Rone delivered on his promise to “unleash hate” on the enemy attackers who were trying to kill them.

Then another mortar exploded. Rone stopped firing.

After two near misses, the attackers had adjusted their aim with devastating results. The third explosion was a direct mortar hit on the roof of Building C, halfway between Rone and Oz in the northwest corner, and Dave Ubben in the northeast corner.

When the mortar exploded on the roof, Oz had just finished reloading. He was rising out of his squatting position to resume shooting. The ear-splitting blast threw Oz back and off balance, knocking him to one knee. He somehow caught himself before going down completely. Through a cloud of black smoke Oz glanced left. The blast had hit Rone.

The former SEAL with the King Leonidas beard, who’d extended his stay in Benghazi to help protect Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, who intended to retire from GRS operator trips to work with his wife, who was eager to raise his infant son and see his two older boys grow into
men, who instinctively and compulsively watched over his fellow operators, who led the rescue charge into the Compound, who searched through a burning building for two missing men, and who answered the first two explosions by rising with a machine gun and returning fire, had absorbed the deadly concussive force of the explosion.

Oz saw Rone lying on his side, curled almost in a fetal position, motionless and silent. His machine gun was blown from his hands, broken somewhere on the grassy field below. Rone faced away from Oz, toward the parapet, so Oz couldn’t tell if he was conscious. But if Rone wasn’t rising to his feet and returning to the fight, Oz knew that he had reason to fear the worst.

Oz looked toward the northeast corner, but through the smoke he couldn’t see if Dave Ubben remained on the box near the ladder. Oz heard no sound from that direction. He knew that Glen Doherty was somewhere toward the south side of the roof, but he neither saw nor heard the Tripoli operator he’d met less than five minutes earlier.