PREFACE

I’M EIGHTY-FOUR YEARS OLD and no longer able to run the missions. It’s May 2, 2011. I received a telephone call from a contact at the Pentagon. Some people from the old days still remember me.

“Bone,” the caller said. “You’re going to want to be in on this. Stay by the phone. I’ll call back and let you know how it comes out.”

“Bone” is a nickname from a different time. It started at Bullis School, where I played football. I don’t recall exactly, but “Bone,” I think, is a contraction of “Hambone” or “Bone Crusher.” I was a big kid and I hit hard and often.

I’m waiting. Waiting for that call back. Wondering what the hell my guys have got themselves into this time. I know one thing, always. You can depend on them, depend on them to kick ass and get a job done. I helped make them that way.

* * *

Halfway around the globe, twin Blackhawk helicopters—“stealth” versions with sharp “Transformer” angles to deflect enemy radar—slide over the crests of the Sarban Hills and ride black after-midnight downdrafts toward a scattering of lights flung across the bowl-like Orash Valley. Abbottabad, Pakistan.

“Three minutes!”

The alert warning crackles through the two troop compartments. Two dozen U.S. Navy SEALs from DEVGRU (Special Warfare Development Group, better known as SEAL Team Six) grip weapons, adjust night vision goggles, check equipment. They tap each other on the shoulders or helmets and receive a muted “hoo-yah” in response. They have trained and rehearsed for this special mission these past weeks using mock-up compounds back in the States and then at the staging area on Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

“Go” had been ordered by highest authority, the president of the United States. Within the next hour, if everything goes according to plan, al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist, with a $25 million bounty on his head, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attack on America, sought by a dozen other countries for international crimes, will be reaching room temperature.

Chief Petty Officer Robert “Rob” O’Neill, thirty-four, is a member of the “kill” element. Like every other SEAL on the mission, he is a seasoned veteran who served two previous combat tours in Iraq and participated in more than four hundred missions, including the rescue of the hijacked crew of the Maersk Alabama from Somali pirates in 2009.

“The more we trained on it,” O’Neill would say later, “the more we realized … this is going to be a one-way mission. We’re going to go and we’re not coming back. We’re going to die when the house blows up … when he blows up.”

SEALs expect the house to be possibly wired with explosives.

“Or,” O’Neill said, “we are going to be there too long and we’ll get arrested by the Pakistanis and we’re going to spend the rest of our short lives in a Pakistan prison. [But] it’s worth it to kill him. He’s going to die with us.”

* * *

My phone jangles inside a residence in a gated community at Virginia Beach even as the airborne element of Trident Spear streaks out of Pakistan with bin Laden’s bullet-mangled corpse aboard. It’s the call I’m expecting.

“Bone,” a voice says. “Bone, your SEALs did it. They did it!”