13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi Read Free

unsurprising that two conflicting thoughts entered his mind. First was excitement:
I wonder what adventures this place is going to bring.
Then came its counterbalance, worry:
I wonder if I’ll ever see my family again.
    It was August 2012, and Jack was about to join the Benghazi team of a secretive US government organization called the Global Response Staff. Created after the 9/11 attacks, the GRS consisted of full-time CIA security staffers, supplemented by former military special operators like Jack, who were hired on a lucrative contract basis. GRSofficers served as bodyguards for spies, diplomats, and other American personnel in the field. The more dangerous a posting, the more likely GRS operators were nearby in the shadows, protecting America’s envoys and covert intelligence gatherers. Few if any postings were more dangerous than Benghazi, Libya.
    As a former Navy SEAL, Jack was a natural fit for the GRS. At thirty-eight years old, self-possessed and darkly handsome, he stood six foot two and carried 210 pounds on his muscular frame. In his usual attire of a black T-shirt and khaki shorts, Jack looked like a strapping construction worker. On the plane, though, wearing dress slacks, brown leather shoes, and a tucked-in button-down shirt, he might be mistaken for an American businessman seeking import-export opportunities ten months after the death of deposed dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. At least that was Jack’s hope as the jet’s wheels touched down.
    Jack’s arrival marked his first visit to Libya and the start of his sixth trip as a GRS operator; his previous trips had taken him to the Middle East and elsewhere. For official purposes in Benghazi, Jack would simply say that he’d be working as a security staffer for diplomats from the US State Department. Men who protect spies don’t advertise that fact.
    Before leaving the plane, Jack slipped off his gold wedding band and tucked it into a small box for safekeeping. He’d picked up the habit years earlier, after deciding that he didn’t want his enemies to know that he had a family: a wife and two young sons waiting for him back home in the Pacific Northwest.
    Jack stepped onto the tarmac and felt the bone-dry afternoon heat of the Libyan summer. His aviator sunglasseswere modest protection from the harsh white glare of the North African sun. Entering the run-down terminal building, Jack pushed through doors to a room with a luggage carousel and more than a hundred people packed inside a space that would have felt crowded with half as many. His fellow luggage-seekers, most of them men, shouted in Arabic and gestured wildly as they fought to claim bags. The air was thick with flies and the nauseating stench of baked-on body odor. Jack took short breaths through his mouth in a futile effort to keep both at bay.
    He’d been on guard from the moment he left the plane, a reflex reaction whenever Jack arrived in hostile territory. Hyper-aware, his jaw set, his every movement grew deliberate, measured to convey in body language that he wasn’t looking for trouble but wouldn’t flinch from it, either. Jack felt the stares of strangers upon him and knew that at least some were armed. He also knew that everyone watching him had reached the same instant conclusion: American. He suspected that at least some wished him dead.
    As he waited for his bags, Jack caught sight of a burly, bearded man standing with his back against a wall at the periphery of the scrum. The man’s eyes scanned the crowd while his body remained as still as a lizard on a tree limb. He wore khaki cargo pants and a navy-blue button-down shirt, untucked, Jack knew, to conceal a gun in his waistband. Their eyes met for an instant. Jack returned his gaze to the luggage carousel, and the bearded man remained expressionless, glued to the wall.
    When Jack grabbed his bags, the man pushed away from the wall and turned toward the exit door leading to Customs. Jack followed a short distance behind. By the