I Hunted and Killed Osama bin Laden

By John Boyd

An inside story of going after the world’s number one bad guy, I Hunted and Killed Osama bin Laden is a first person account that is chilling and seems unbelievable at first until the story leads to a trail of deceit and lies that don’t stop until it’s almost too late.

Ray Rivers, an alias, tells his story of being set up after completing the most impossible mission of his life.

He has to fight for survival as he turns into the world’s number one marked man, chased and hunted by operators like himself.

Marked by whom and why is the question.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Boyd
• Release date: Nov 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781617925597

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I Hunted and Killed Osama bin Laden

by

John Boyd

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

I Hunted and Killed Osama bin Laden

Special Smashwords Edition

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you’re reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

Copyright -2012 -John Boyd. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

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ISBN: 978-1-617925-59-7 (eBook)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

About the Author

Novels by John Boyd

Connect with me Online

Twisted Fate (preview)

Acknowledgements

I have a great deal of people to thank for their assistance along the line getting this book out. First to my team: George, David, Ty, Bonnie, Robert, Bernie, Audrey, and Lars.

The continued effort you have put in making my brand is humbling. Thank you all!

To my wife Mariana who has supported me in all things I do without fail or question. You are an amazing person who makes getting up in the morning fun with your positive outlook and faith on life, who still gives me Butterflies when I see you. This book is for you sweetheart.

PROLOGUE

The story you are about to read is true, not some fiction writer’s fantasy. If you are reading this, it means I’m dead, and they think they’ve won. My name is not important, only the story is. But for simplicity’s sake, call me Ray Rivers. It is one of my aliases.

It’s been said that time stands still, even stops at the moment of death. Why that happens, I’m not sure. Could be something designed by the Almighty to humble us prior to judgment. That moment has happened to me more than once. It’s real, and it has caused me to pen this.

It had only been seventy-two hours when Tommy Denton and I had made it back to U.S. soil. You ask, seventy-two hours from what, where or when? From killing Osama bin Laden and fleeing Pakistan is what.

We, traveling under assumed identities, landed in Charlotte, North Carolina, still reeling from what we had accomplished and the task that still faced us. The task was to tell two young wives that their husbands had been killed on foreign soil and wouldn’t be coming back. The two men I’m talking about are Rich and Larry Faulkner, twin brothers and part of a four-man team put together to hunt, capture, and kill Osama bin Laden. They were my best friends from childhood. Both brothers had been married about three years. Married only weeks apart. Getting bin Laden was easy compared to what faced us now. See, it was my team, and my job to see they survived. I failed and I don’t often fail at anything.

Tommy got a rental from the Hertz counter as I called the bank to make sure the money transfers had been made. I struck out on that end, not being able to make contact before Tommy waved a key in my face. I hung up the phone. I would take care of that later. We left Charlotte Douglas airport and headed east toward southeast Charlotte where the wives lived. My parents, whom I hadn’t seen in a year, also resided in Charlotte so it was nice to be entering familiar territory.

We turned off on a new beltway that would take us to the Pineville-Matthews area. When I was a kid, both those small towns were considered the back forty. Now, people were moving even farther away because they were too close. I could see Charlotte’s ever increasing skyline and it looked like another couple of skyscrapers had popped up.

We’re clean, Tommy said, driving, waking me from my stroll down Memory Lane.

That’s good, I replied, feeling a little guilty that I’d let my guard down. We had both been pretty confident that our exodus from Pakistan had been clean after a rocky start. Still, better to be safe than sorry.

Next exit east, I said.

Been here, done that, Tommy said, laughing at his quip.

He’s a Texas boy, but had made a number of trips to Charlotte over the years with us.

Your folks’ house first, or…? he asked.

I swallowed. Let’s see my folks last.

We didn’t speak for the next twenty minutes of the drive. I was reconsidering my thoughts about what we had accomplished, and the costs. The costs were way more than the accomplishment. We’d been listening to the radio since we got in the car and still no breaking news announcing the world’s number one terrorist’s capture and death. It had been three days, and still nothing. We both had thought it would have already been the top news story, but no. Neither of us could figure out what the holdup was, but that wasn’t our concern. We didn’t want anyone to know it was us that pulled off what seemed impossible since 9/11.

Another reason to head home quickly was to send my folks on a vacation in case news leaked of our involvement in bin Laden’s death. With my cut of the fifty million dollars bounty, I could hide them as well as give them the retirement I’d hoped they’d have. The CIA guaranteed us that there would be no leaks with our identities, but I didn’t trust them. Things with them become blurry at times. It was less than twenty years since bin Laden had been a CIA Golden Boy, fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a patriot and I generally believe in our government. I just don’t trust the people who make up the government. I could imagine some politician on some oversight committee reading a Top Secret classified document about the bin Laden take down and decide to inform the public. When the time comes to let it loose, I want to be drinking a pina colada on a secluded beach.

We’re here, Tommy said, and I swallowed again.

My dead best friends’ wives lived together in the house Rich and Larry grew up in. The house had been left to the brothers after their parents died in a car accident a little more than five years ago. Since the brothers left the U.S. military a year ago with Tommy and me, the girls moved in together to wait for their men to come home. Now, that wouldn’t happen.

We both stepped out of the car and saw that no cars were in the driveway. Seeing the cars gone gave me a short reprieve from breaking the bad news. We knocked on the door and waited, but nothing happened.

Where are those damn beasts of theirs? Tommy asked.

Rich and Larry had two of the biggest pit bulls I’d ever seen and I’d forgotten about them.

Probably penned up out back if the girls are out, I replied, trying the door handle. Locked. Let’s check around back. We left the front porch and walked around the side of the house.

The fence area that kept the dogs was about fifty feet back. I glanced quickly and was surprised at not seeing the dogs, or at least, hearing them. The rear door was locked, and the kitchen table still had plates and cereal boxes I could see through the glass. Probably breakfast, I thought. But it was now mid-afternoon so they’d been gone awhile.

Jesus Christ, Tommy said. He had walked to the dog pen.

What? I asked turning and heading his way.

Both dogs were dead, shot in the head. Double tapped, actually. The hairs on the back of my head stood straight up, and I grabbed Tommy by the arm.

Let’s get out of here, I said.

But the girls? he asked, jogging next to me.

Nobody double taps a dog.

Well, somebody did, he said, climbing in the vehicle.

Yeah. An operator. And we were operators.

Sick bastards to do that to a dog, Tommy said, pulling away, gaining speed.

I put his satellite phone to my ear to call my folks. I just nodded as the phone rang. Then I got their phone mail with the same corny message they’ve had for years.

Shit. Mom and dad aren’t home, I said.

You want to head there anyway? Tommy asked.

Yeah. At least we can wait for them, I said, still wondering what the hell had happened back there, and why.

We talked about the dead dogs, and the girls until we pulled into my childhood home’s driveway. Both my parents’ cars were there and that hair-on-end thing happened again.

The key’s under that flowerpot, I said to Tommy as we got out in the carport. I went to the storage closet and picked up an old baseball bat as he grabbed the key. The baseball bat, I thought, was better than nothing. There was no connection between the dead dogs and my parents, just a sense that I needed to be a little more cautious. Tommy had the key in the lock in the back door as I rounded the corner.

I tried to scream but couldn’t, as time decided to stand still.

ONE

The temperature was hovering a little above 120 degrees, and it wasn’t even 11 a.m. yet. The good news was it wasn’t our first foray into Kuwait, just the first time in summer.

Shit, it’s hot, Larry Faulkner said, wiping the sweat from his eyes.

We’ve been in worse, I said.

Where? Larry asked, continuing looking through binoculars at a grouping of tents a half mile away.

Mindanao, Sudan, Bangkok, I quickly spit out.

Yeah, Mindanao, Philippines, and Sudan were hot, Rich, Larry’s twin brother, put in. But Bangkok, it was winter last time we were there.

Tommy Denton laughed. You must have gone to a different girly bar than we did.

Oh, yeah. But, I thought we were talking about Ops, Rich said.

Hell, I thought the Bangkok Op was to get laid, I said, and we all laughed. You failed the mission, soldier.

Here comes another vehicle, Larry said, getting us all focused on the task at hand. The task, or Op, in this case, was to snatch and grab Abu Nabil, al Qaeda’s number three man according to the United States government.

Is it his? I asked, seeing it was a white Chevy Caprice, the vehicle of choice for thousands of Kuwaitis.

Yeah, it’s him, Larry said, lowering the binoculars.

The four of us then began reviewing the plan we had laid out. We still had hours before darkness would set in. The wadi we’d chosen to set up camp resembled a small, dried creek bed. Of course, there was no creek. This was pure desert. The wadis came from when the short, hard rains fell following the slight contour changes in a very flat landscape. A majority of the landscape changes came from the frequent sandstorms that plagued the desert. We’d been in Kuwait for almost two months trying to locate the slippery Kuwaiti watching three different locations. The Intel on the locations was given to us in a package by our CIA contact.

We had been together in the United States Army for years, until about three months ago when we all decided to call it quits. In fact, Rich and Larry Faulkner enlisted with me after the US invasion of Panama and capture of Manuel Noriega. I had graduated from the University of North Carolina and thought at the time I’d serve my country three or four years then pursue some job on Wall Street and become a gazillionaire, having received a degree in international finance mixed in among sports, drinking, and chasing girls. The three or four years turned into twenty, and Wall Street became a dream. The gazillionaire thing is why I was sitting in some godforsaken desert, because a successful capture of Abu Nabil would pay us five million dollars.

I retired a major in the US Army, starting as a grunt, then officer candidate school, a ranger, then onto Delta as a team leader. The three guys who were now sweating with me were on that team for the last ten years, all as sergeants and damn good. No, not good. Great.

We called it quits sitting in a restaurant in Kabul, Afghanistan about four months ago. We were eating and imbibing a little, with a couple of ex-Deltas-turned-military-contractors working for a Blackwater-type company run by a retired general. They were recruiting us with tales of money and sets of ROE’s Rules of Engagements, we could live with. During our little dinner, we were joined by Richard Williams of the CIA. I didn’t know it then, but he headed the CIA’s Osama bin Laden taskforce. After listening to tales of untold riches, we returned to base, but not before Mr. CIA slipped me a piece of paper with a phone number on it.

We had made our decision before that night that twenty was enough for a multitude of reasons, frustration being the main one. Since my early days of the military, and during my stay, I witnessed in all its splendor a change; the commercialization of war. I’m a student of history, so it didn’t surprise me. I don’t believe that the normal United States citizen understands the change in our military since the first Gulf war and 9/11.

Today, as I write this, military contractors outnumber actual troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s the commercialization I’m talking about, not weapons and tools of war. That’s been going on since the cavemen roamed the earth. The amount of money paid to the military contractors is staggering. Plus, they can bend and break the rules at will. So, when the President announced a troop withdrawal as a campaign promise, you can be sure that the mercs, in equal or greater numbers, passed us as we left. The money that was offered us as a four-man team was unbelievable, even more than I heard from others who’d made the switch. We switched as well, but decided on a different route.

We didn’t want to trade bosses or superior officers. We’d do it ourselves, and to that end, I called Mr. CIA because I was sure he could offer us a different route. I had rubbed shoulders with the CIA often. I also knew, in most cases, they were the paymasters for the specialized mercs. I was right. He offered us specialized Ops as bounty hunters going after the bad guys. Abu Nabil was to be our first order in plating the big cheese, UBL, the military’s weird acronym for Osama bin Laden.

Both the US military and CIA had extensive files on UBL, and to get a complete peek into those reports, you had to go through a rite of passage. Since Bush II put out the fifty million dollar bounty on UBL after 9/11, literally hundreds of mercs and thousands of ex-US military personnel had tried to hunt him down and kill him. All to no avail. The Russians had tried in the eighties and couldn’t do it either, having come close once, wounding him before he slithered into a hole.

The information our new best friend offered us on Abu Nabil was impressive, and I don’t impress easily.

Abu Nabil was forty-five years old, from a rich Kuwaiti family, and had decided he hated the US after we’d invaded his country and run Saddam out. We’d been told he’d been a part in the planned 9/11 London bombing team. A genuinely bad guy, his role with al Qaeda as their purported number three man, was to move money. Over the last few years he’d been spotted in Kuwait, Dubai, and Pakistan, always reappearing unscathed. The CIA had been given the green light to attempt his capture, using black (secret) non-military assets only. We guessed the reason was to keep a failure from becoming an international incident in countries where our popularity was waning.

We followed Nabil from Dubai to Kuwait. He entered the normal route through the airport while we entered through Iraq, opting not to go through the visa process. Knowing smuggling tools of the trade in luggage wouldn’t work, our CIA contact had lined us up after our military separation with someone in Pakistan to help with IDs, false passports, and papers for our new lives. We used those to enter Iraq as military contractors. We used our own contacts in Iraq to buy those aforementioned tools of the trade.

Since the years of US military occupation in Iraq, literally dozens of black market army surplus stores had popped up. With the right money you could buy anything, even a helicopter. We had pooled our money for this venture and used a good chunk of it to outfit ourselves. We’d be broke if we didn’t capture Nabil as planned.

We bought a used car in Basra, our point of entry into Iraq, and loaded it with goods. With our IDs and fake checkpoint passes, we left Basra, drove west and south until we found a safe, un-watched crossing spot into Kuwait.

At one time, Saddam had attempted to build a moat along the Iraq-Kuwait border to keep the US military from a second incursion into Iraq after the first Gulf war. At the border we found some old barbed wire, but crossed without a hitch. We drove slow and careful until we reached an east/west highway into Kuwait City. A broken down, abandoned vehicle along the way gave us Kuwaiti plates for our car so we wouldn’t stick out more than we did. Once we found the first outer ring road, we took it until it fed into the Gulf road. Heading south, we passed Kuwait City and reached Ahmadi, home to the country’s oil industry.

All of us had been deployed there for the first Gulf war and generally knew the area. We found a small hotel normally used for temporary oil workers and got two adjoining rooms. Once settled in, we laid out all of our Intel involving Nabil’s family and began a slow, methodical search of addresses on the best map of the area.

Nabil’s close family members who still lived in Kuwait enjoyed two residences, one in Ahmadi and the other in Fahaheel, an adjoining town. We began a vigil, dividing into two pairs, me with Larry Faulkner, and Tommy with his brother, Rich.

Days turned into weeks, but we knew patience wins the war, so we continued our