The four helicopters chuffed urgently through the Khyber Pass, racing over the lights of Peshawar and down toward the quiet city of Abbottabad and the prosperous neighborhood of Bilal Town. In the dark houses below slept doctors, lawyers, retired military officers — and perhaps Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted fugitive.
Half a world away, it was Sunday afternoon in the crowded White House Situation Room. President Barack Obama was stone-faced as he followed the unfolding drama on silent video screens — a drama he alone had the power to start but now was powerless to control.
At a meeting three days earlier, Obama had heard his options summarized. He could continue to watch the strange compound using spies and satellites in hopes that the prey would reveal himself. He could knock out the building from a safe distance using B-2 bombers and their precision-guided payloads. Or he could unleash the special force of Seals known as Team 6.
How strong was the intelligence? he asked. A 50% to 80% chance, he was told. What could go wrong? Plenty: a hostage situation, a diplomatic crisis — a dozen varieties of the sort of botch that ruins a presidency. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter authorized a daring helicopter raid on Tehran to free American hostages. The ensuing debacle helped bury his re-election hopes.
To wait was to risk a leak, now that more than a hundred people had been briefed on the possible raid. To bomb might mean that the U.S. would never know for sure whether the mission was a success. As for an assault by special forces, U.S. relations with the Pakistani government were tricky enough without staging a raid on sovereign territory.
Sunday morning, the bet was placed: American choppers invaded the airspace of a foreign country without warning, to attack a walled compound housing unknown occupants.
As Obama followed the operation from the Situation Room, chaos addled the satellite feeds . A hole was blown through the side of the house, gunfire erupted. Seals worked their way through the smaller buildings inside the compound. Others swarmed upward in the main building, floor by floor, until they came to the room where they hoped to find their cornered target. Then they were inside the room for a final burst of gunfire.
