“How tall is this guy?”

Holed up in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Osama bin Laden sat at a computer and set down his thoughts in a long letter dated April 26, 2011, to Atiyah Abdul al-Rahman, his third-in-command and the link to his far-flung and beleaguered followers—the man he addressed as Sheikh Mahmud. It was the al-Qaeda leader’s sixth spring of confinement in Abbottabad. His hair and beard had grown white. Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden’s life had shrunk to the cramped and crowded space of the upper two floors of a house behind high walls.

— Mark Bowden’s ”The Finish,” an account of the hunt for and killing of Osama Bin Laden, hits bookstores on Tuesday. Vanity Fair has a very Mark Bowden-y excerpt online, if you are interested in giving that a read.