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As Bobby reached for his rucksack, four Somali put rifles up to his head. I thought they were going to blow his brains out.
Bobby shouted, “Whoa, guys! Back off!” And looked like he was about to shit his pants. All of us tensed up.
Their leader motioned with his arm. Using the few words of English he knew, he said, “Down! Down! We shoot you!”
Screw that.
His volume increased. “Down! Get down!” It looked like his eyes were going to pop out of their sockets.
We weren’t moving. No fucking way.
As their leader continued pointing at the ground and screaming, a couple of the other armed Somali discovered the gear we’d started digging up. Thankfully, they didn’t look through the bags, because if they had, they would have seen the mines and demolition equipment and quickly figured out that we were up to no good.
Our LT said, “We speak English. Do you know someone who speaks English?”
“Eng-leesh?”
“Yeah, English. We’re Americans.”
This seemed to register with their leader, who decided to hold us prisoner while one of his men returned to the nearest village to find someone who spoke our language.
Several hours later, his man came back with a dirty-looking fellow who described himself as a local merchant. He wore a robe with a dark vest over it and spoke some English.
It was approaching midnight. The merchant explained that the Somali were going to kill us for trespassing on their land. He said, “Okay, sir. Now you must lie on your stomach, so they can shoot you in the back. Because that’s what they do here to trespassers.”
No, we told him. That’s not going to happen.
What started as a standoff turned into a discussion conducted without anger or raised voices but with loaded AK-47s still pointed at our heads.
After several hours of back-and-forth, the Somali leader gave us permission to show the interpreter one of the ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ we had in our rucksacks. “It says that we’re only on a training mission,” the LT explained. “We’re Americans. We’re sorry we trespassed on your land. We won’t do it again.”
The Somali leader considered this, then pointed emphatically to our rubber boat and said, “Go!”
The local merchant elaborated. “He wants you to get in your boat and go back to America.”
“Sure thing.” That was a long way to travel with a 55-horsepower motor, but it sounded good.
“Go…now!” the leader repeated.
“Yeah. Right away.”
We thanked the merchant and the leader, who turned and left with his armed men and the merchant, to our great relief.
Our LT had been right not to resist them. If we’d done anything differently, all four of us would most likely have been shot and left to die on the beach in Somalia.
We were physically and mentally exhausted. “LT,” Bobby O. said. “We just cheated death. What do you say we go home?” None of us felt like diving into shark-infested waters.
LT wasn’t having any of it. Like I said before, he was a gung ho type. He growled, “Guys, get your gear on. Our mission won’t be a success unless we complete it. Let’s go!”
“Has he lost his friggin’ mind?” Bobby O. asked under his breath.
Still wearing our skin suits, we donned masks, fins, white belts, and rebreathers. Then dove into the warm, pitch-black bay, which stank and was covered with a layer of oily gunk. Our route took us right past the camel-meat processing plant. All I could think of was the sharks. When something brushed past me, my heart almost stopped.
We were going on pure adrenaline and couldn’t see a thing other than the luminescent dials of our depth gauges, compasses, and Tudor dive watches. The German diving Drägers strapped to our chests were feeding us 100 percent oxygen so that no bubbles could be seen on the surface.
We had four hours max before that high a concentration of oxygen became toxic. We traveled in two-man teams. I was paired with Bobby. He was the navigator and focused on his dive compass, while I timed each leg of the dive with my watch. After we swam an allotted amount of time on a particular bearing, I’d squeeze his arm, which was the signal for him to stop and set the next direction on the compass.
We doglegged through the harbor for three hours underwater until we located the right ship. Then we extracted the ■■■■■■■■■■■ from a pack and attached it to the ship’s hull exactly where our intel had determined it should be placed. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■