ABBOTTABAD: MAY 1, 2011—LATE THAT NIGHT
ON THE NIGHT THAT OSAMA BIN LADEN was killed, Sohaib Athar could not sleep. The thirty-three-year-old IT consultant had moved his young family to Abbottabad almost six months earlier. He’d come to this quiet city after his wife and son were hit by a car on the teeming streets of Lahore. A physics grad of Forman Christian University, Sohaib also held a master of science from the University of the Punjab. He liked to say that in his previous life he was a “start-up specialist”—he’d come to Abbottabad to open a coffee shop and Internet café. Business was good. His Web site said proudly that his was the first coffee shop in Abbottabad to brew fresh espresso. Sohaib Athar was a quiet man and he wanted a quiet life.
That night, the windows were open in his apartment on the Jadoon Plaza. The heat of the day was slow in breaking, and by midnight, scented wind blew down from the Shimala Hills above the city. Spring was coming to the foothills of the Hindu Kush, and as the days had grown hotter, people were shifting their activity to the evening, when it was cooler. Past midnight, a handful of shops were still open, and now and again a truck would rumble past the dusty strip mall sprawling on either side of Sohaib’s balcony. The city of Abbottabad was falling asleep.
Just before one in the morning on May 2, Sohaib heard a buzzing sound; it grew in volume and faded, came in with the wind and left with it. Finally, he could tell it was the noise of a helicopter—or maybe a couple of them.
Sohaib looked out the window toward the echoing hills. The night was hazy, and above the glare of the streetlights he could see nothing. The sound came again and then it was gone, like someone had thrown a switch.
He crossed from the balcony to his laptop and logged on to his Twitter account: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”
Sohaib could have no idea of what was unfolding three miles to the east of his balcony. It was 12:58 a.m., and at a place called Yaba Yar, a team of United States Navy SEALs were jumping from helicopters into the high-walled compound of Osama bin Laden.
A top secret Stealth Hawk helicopter had lost power and crashed after inserting an assault element on the roof of the main building. Later, a Pentagon spokesman would claim that there had been a “rough landing” but the men who witnessed it, and the others watching overhead monitors knew better.
It was there, hovering above the main building, and then it fell out of the sky. Enveloped in an opaque cloud of dust, 32,000 pounds of top secret American technology slammed into the ground and beat itself to pieces. It took fifteen agonizing seconds for the engines to flame out and for the rotors to stop. During that eternity, broken pieces of aircraft, communications equipment, and flight components were tossed in all directions. The transmission blew itself apart and one of the forty-two-foot-long Kevlar rotors was launched a hundred yards, landing in a field of beans.
It was a flat miracle that no one was killed.
When the dust cleared, SEALs and pilots in the other aircraft could see men moving in the wreckage. Incredibly, the five-member flight crew had survived.
A little more than a mile away, Sohaib stood on his balcony, listening.
He had not heard the helicopter go down—and he was unlikely to have noticed the sound, for the death throes of a real helicopter are nothing like the crashes in the movies. The doomed helicopter’s engines had screamed and the disintegrating rotors had made a sound like a stick being pulled across a picket fence. Sohaib listened; another helicopter, this one an MH-47 Chinook, flew nearby and lumbered off to the east. He heard the Chinook, but did not see it. Like the other helicopters used in the assault, this aircraft flew without lights and was painted the exact color of the dusky night.
Sohaib went to his keyboard and tweeted again: “Go away helicopter—before I take out my giant swatter ;-/”.
At four minutes past one in the morning, an enormous boom shook the city—a thunder blast out of a cloudless sky. Far away in the darkness, the SEALs had used plastic explosive charges to blow in the front gate of Bin Laden’s compound. People who heard the explosion said it sounded like a car bomb.
Sohaib watched the tweets of his friends scroll across his laptop’s screen: @m0chin tweeted: “All silent after the blast, but a friend heard it 6 km away too … the helicopter is gone…”
Then one from han3yy: “OMG: S Bomb Blasts in Abbottabad. I hope everyone is fine ☺”.
Traffic on the street below Sohaib’s window had now stopped completely. The entire city of Abbottabad seemed to hold its breath. There were two or three more explosions, smaller, muffled, but Sohaib thought they might be just as deadly. Maybe he had been foolish to think that this was a safe place. He walked back into his living room, sat down at his laptop and tweeted again: