13 Hours The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi (40 page)

It also occurred to Jack that the attackers had targeted the single most important and most crowded building inside the walls. Building C housed the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility and the operators’ Team Room, which logically made it the Command Post, and therefore the most likely place for Americans to have taken refuge.
To be that accurate
, Jack thought,
that precise with those mortars, they had to have been very proficient, and they had to have known the exact location of that building
.

Maybe their enemies had done it by dead reckoning, a product of trial and error with help from a concealed spotter. Another possibility was that the attackers had used latitude and longitude coordinates provided by a GPS device, perhaps in a car that drove up to the front gate, or on the smartphone of someone walking outside the Annex. It had occurred to D.B. that the man he’d seen walking outside the Annex might have employed a more primitive approach
to target locating: estimating distances by pacing them off on foot.

The more Jack thought about it, the more he felt consumed by dread. Now that the enemy had dialed in the position of the Annex buildings, they might fire twenty or thirty mortars inside the walls. Every rooftop and walkway was vulnerable. Worse, Jack anticipated that the mortars were only the first wave of a full-on assault. As Jack envisioned it, first the attackers would soften up the American defenders by raining mortars on their positions. Then they’d move in on the ground with RPGs and heavy machine guns. Jack knew that he and his fellow operators would put up a ferocious fight, but eventually the Annex walls would give way. The outnumbered, outgunned defenders could hold out only for so long against an overwhelming force.

Considering what had already happened and the various ways the Annex might be overrun, Jack concluded that he’d reached the low point of not only the long night, but of his entire life. He feared that the men atop Building C were dead or dying, adding to the death toll of Chris Stevens and Sean Smith. Having somehow missed the radio call in which the T.L. said that everyone inside Building C was safe, Jack suspected that the mortars had penetrated the roof and killed some or all of them, too. It seemed only a matter of time before he and every other American in Benghazi were dead. He didn’t want to imagine what the radicals might do to their bodies.

Jack’s thoughts returned to the mortars. He thought about how powerless the Annex fighters were against bombs dropping from above.
You don’t know if it’s coming
, he thought.
It’s not like you can defend against it. You’re just out in the open. You can’t shoot back towards it. It’s basically a lottery. If it’s your time, it’s your time, and death can come right out of the sky and kill you in an instant.

He heard the T.L. call on the radio for everyone at fighting positions to check in, by order of location. From Building A. Tanto called: “Roger, all OK.” D.B. reported that he was safe on Building B. Everyone waited to hear a voice from Building C. None came.

“Building C, check in.” Still nothing. “Building C?”

The silence confirmed in Jack’s mind that his worst fears had been realized for Rone, Oz, and Dave Ubben. It was hard to imagine that he could have felt worse, but that would have been the case if Jack had known that a fourth man was on the roof: His friend Glen “Bub” Doherty was up there, too.

Finally, Jack filled the empty radio space. “Building D, roger,” he said in a melancholy voice. “I’m OK.”

Like Jack, D.B. felt as though it was only a matter of time before more mortars hit them. He knew that he needed to cover the area east of the wall, but he also considered abandoning his post if he heard the thumps and whistles of incoming mortars. Then he told himself,
That’s actually pretty stupid. Usually the mortar round that hits you is the one you don’t hear
.

After the third mortar hit the roof, Tanto heard the squeal of tires from the area south of the Annex around the dirt racetrack. When no more mortars launched, he believed that some members of the ten-car motorcade had in fact gone in pursuit of the attackers and had chased them off.

At the same time, he wondered when he and the other Benghazi operators would get relief from the Tripoli team, all of whom except Glen remained inside Building C. He called to D.B. on the next rooftop: “Where the fuck are all these guys from Tripoli?”

Tanto returned his focus to a possible ground assault.
Need to get ready
, he told himself. He stared into the unfinished four-story building across the road to the south. Tanto told D.B. that he continued to hear voices in the field near the building, whispering and mumbling from among the weeds. D.B. tossed him a pair of binoculars across the narrow gap between their roofs, to help Tanto scour the building and the grounds nearby.

Between sweeps across his sector, Tanto called the T.L. to say that the ten-car motorcade escort had left. “It doesn’t look like they’re coming back,” Tanto said. “We’re gonna need another way to get out of here.”

As Tanto remained on watch, he felt as though he’d been prepared for everything that had already happened, and everything yet to come.
You don’t have time to feel sorry for yourself
, he thought.
You don’t feel sorry for anybody else. You can feel sorry once you’re safe and you’re sitting back and drinking a beer, and you can howl at the moon. When everything’s done, you can feel sorry.

With each rung he climbed on the Building C ladder, Tig swiveled his head toward Zombieland, watching for muzzle flashes to see if anyone was about to shoot him in the back. The attackers had stopped shooting after the third mortar struck the roof, but neither Tig nor any of the other Americans knew whether their enemies would
resume shooting, launch more mortars, or attempt to breach the walls and invade the Annex. They expected nothing less.

Tig leapt over the parapet and ducked low as he looked around the blackened roof. The sun still hung below the horizon and smoke still swirled, giving Tig only a few feet of visibility. “I need help up here,” he called on the radio.

The first man Tig spotted was Dave Ubben, propped against the parapet ten feet from the northeast corner, conscious but dazed, a pistol in his right hand. Tig knelt next to Ubben and grabbed the gun, worried that while in shock and pain the DS agent might mistake Tig for someone who needed to be shot. He tossed the pistol to the side and pulled out a headlamp from Oz’s medical bag. Tig flipped down a red lens cover to keep from painting a target for the attackers.

Tig saw that Ubben had suffered major injuries to his lower left leg and serious wounds to his left arm below the elbow. Tig pulled out both tourniquets from Oz’s medical bag. Just as Rone had demonstrated days earlier during the medical refresher course, Tig applied the first tourniquet to Ubben’s badly damaged leg. As he worked in the darkness, Tig accidentally raked his hand across the edge of one of Ubben’s protruding bones. The razor-sharp bone sliced through Tig’s skin, but he’d worry about it later. He moved to Ubben’s arm, tightening the second tourniquet just below the armpit. As he worked, Tig offered a steady stream of reassurances.

“Hang in there, dude.… You’re gonna be OK.… We’re gonna get you down.… It’s gonna be all right.… We’ll get you out of here.” Tig reached back to his days as a Marine and pulled out a motivational nickname for the toughest
among them: “Hang in, Devil Dog.” Ubben could only mumble a reply.

When both tourniquets were in place, Tig began to move away from the DS agent to see who else needed help. Ubben roused himself: “Hey man, I need my pistol!”

“Roger that,” Tig said. He reached to pick up the gun, but with his back turned to Ubben he quickly cleared the mag, unloading it so the wounded man couldn’t accidentally shoot him or any others who might come up the ladder to help. After returning Ubben’s gun, Tig ducked behind the parapet and looked around.

Off to his left, Tig saw someone lying motionless, facedown near the center of the roof. The man looked to be beyond help, and Tig wanted to prioritize men who might benefit most.

“Anybody else need help?” he called.

Tig heard moaning from the northwest corner. As he hustled that way, Tig passed a hole in the concrete bigger than his fist from where a mortar hit. As he darted toward the moans, he saw the shapes of two men, one moving, one still, next to each other in the northwest corner.

His frustration rising, Tig called again on his radio: “Hey, I got four guys down. I need help up here. Right now!” He began to suspect that no one wanted to leave the relative safety of Building C in case the mortars and gunfire resumed.

D.B. answered from atop Building B, his voice filled with rage: “I need to know if somebody is going up to Building C, because otherwise I’ve got to get down and get over there.” He couldn’t imagine why members of the Tripoli team hadn’t immediately run to Building C’s ladder to help. Tanto knew that D.B. had the best field of fire
to protect the Annex, so he told D.B. to stay on Building B and he’d go instead.

Before Tanto could move, someone from inside Building C told everyone to remain at their posts: “We got it. We’re coming up.”

To Tig, the wait for help felt like an eternity. Through a veil of pain, Oz heard Tig make the calls for more help. Still not fully comprehending that he was one of the four men down, Oz thought about the man lying next to him:
Shit, I’ve got to help Rone.

When he reached Oz seconds later, Tig forced him to focus first on his own injuries. “Hey man,” Oz told Tig, “look at this.” Using his right hand, Oz lifted his lifeless left hand to put it in its proper place. Then he watched as he let go and it flopped back down to an odd angle. “I think I broke it.”

“Dude,” Tig said, “stop doing that. You’re going to fuck it up even more.”

Tig grabbed the assault rifle from Oz’s lap and set it aside. He picked up the one-piece combat tourniquet that Oz hadn’t been able to apply, pulled the band around Oz’s upper arm, and twisted it tight to stop the bleeding. Tig knew that Oz needed a lot more care inside Building C and eventually a hospital. He helped him to his feet and asked Oz if he could walk to the ladder.

“I think I can,” Oz said as he took tentative steps forward. “I’ll make do.”

As Oz shuffled away, Tig dropped to his knees and rolled Rone onto his back on the wet rooftop. He ripped off Rone’s Rhodesian vest and his other gear, then raised his shirt to look over his bare torso front and back, to check for signs of bleeding. The only injuries Tig noticed were small shrapnel
marks on Rone’s forehead. Finding no open wounds needing immediate care, Tig pressed his fingers to Rone’s thick neck to search for a pulse from the carotid artery. Rone’s throat twitched momentarily, but Tig could find no pulse. He flipped up the red lens on his headlamp and shone the white light in Rone’s eyes. Rone’s pupils didn’t react. Tig pressed his ear against Rone’s chest but heard nothing. He put his ear to Rone’s mouth and felt no breath.

Tig worked in silence. The attackers who’d been firing from Zombieland apparently had pulled back. The mortars had stopped. Tig knew that that could change at any moment, but at present the only sounds he heard were trickles of water flowing from shrapnel holes in the nearby tank.