Hunt the Scorpion (8 page)

Eventually the truth caught up with him, as it had with other despots.

When the six Americans reached Immigration, a young man with a wispy beard and thinning hair stepped forward and said, “
Salaam alaikum.
”

Because he had an olive complexion and was casually dressed in a tan shirt and wrinkled brown pants, Crocker assumed he was a local. “
Salaam alaikum
to you.”

The man squinted through gold-rimmed glasses and smiled. “You’re Tom Crocker, right? I’m Douglas Volman from the U.S. embassy.”

“Hey, Doug. Nice to meet you.”

“Welcome to Tripoli. Follow me.”

The six casually dressed “engineers” followed Volman and his driver, whom Volman introduced as Mustafa, out the arched terminal entrance to a large black SUV parked at the curb.

Mustafa wore a green baseball cap with a Playboy Bunny logo embroidered on it. This struck Crocker as too casual for a local employee of the CIA.

“Who’d you say you work for again?” he asked Volman as they started loading their luggage in back.

Volman flashed his diplomatic ID. “I’m a political counselor at the U.S. embassy.”

“State Department?”

“Yeah, Foreign Service.”

Made sense. He seemed smart, well educated—and soft.

They sped through the city on a highway littered with abandoned, stripped cars and garbage. Traffic was chaotic and moved extremely fast. From the passenger seat, Volman turned to face them. He chewed a piece of gum as he spoke.

“Libyans are the friendliest, warmest people in the world. But everyone’s on edge now that Gaddafi is gone.”

“I thought they’d be happy.”

“Some are. Many aren’t. He remained a popular figure with a large segment of the population even until the end. He created a standard of living here that’s higher than that of Brazil.”

“No kidding.”

Approaching the sea, they passed a modern complex made up of five eighteen-story buildings. “Those are the El Emad towers, built by Gaddafi in 1990. They house most of the foreign companies doing business here—oil, telecommunications, construction.”

The skyline boasted a few other modern office towers. The rest of the city seemed to be made up of two- to four-story concrete structures painted white and beige. Domes and minarets marked the locations of the numerous mosques. Slogans in Arabic had been painted on many walls. Some of them depicted a cartoonish Gaddafi asking, “Who am I?”—a reference to one of his last televised speeches, in which he vowed to fight house to house, alley to alley, and taunted the rebels with the question “Who are you?” Others, directed at the interim government, asked, “Where are you?”

Akil translated another that said: “Because the price was the blood of our children, let’s unify, let’s show some tolerance and let’s live together.”

Crocker saw black flags stenciled everywhere—on doors, on the sides of cars, on sidewalks.

“What’s with the black flags?” he asked.

“They stand for al-Qaeda,” Volman said. “The Arab inscription under them is the
shahada,
the Islamic creed, which states, ‘There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is the messenger.’ ”

“They seem to have a strong presence here.”

Volman said, “Tonight you’re staying at the Bab al Sahr Hotel.” He screwed up his mouth in a sour expression.

“Nasty, huh?”

“It’s one of the top hotels in town. The owners claim it’s a five-star. Could be, if they mean five out of fifty.”

“We’ll be fine.” As long as it had a bed, Crocker didn’t care. Unless it was infested with rats and the roof leaked, he’d been in worse.

The Bab al Sahr didn’t look bad from outside—a sand-colored semimodern fifteen-story tower with weird, eye-shaped windows. It faced the Mediterranean, which stank of dead fish and rubbish. To get in they had to pass through a metal detector manned by two young men holding automatic weapons.

 “Nice touch,” observed Crocker.

The lobby reeked of cigarette smoke and BO. The decor reminded Crocker of an office waiting room from the sixties—one that had never been aired out. Functional chairs, sofas, and lamps were arranged around plain coffee tables. A few groups of dark-suited Middle Eastern men sat huddled together, talking in whispers.

At the front desk, Mancini pointed to a comment a former guest had written in the guest book: “Come back, Basil Fawlty. All is forgiven.”

Crocker, a fan of the British sitcom
Fawlty Towers
, laughed out loud.

Volman said, “I’ll give you time to get settled. At eight p.m. I’ll take you to see Al Cowens. He’s attending an event tonight at the Sheraton. It’s the NATO coordinator’s good-bye party. ”

As the CIA station chief, Cowens would be coordinating their mission. Crocker considered him old school, which meant that he wasn’t an analyst or an academic. He was a hard-drinking, hard-working, hands-on guy who loved running operations. He and Crocker had briefly worked together tracking down a group of narco-terrorists in the jungles of Peru. One night they were awakened by the screams of a woman in a hut nearby. By candlelight, they had helped her through a very difficult breech birth.

“How far’s the Sheraton?” Crocker asked.

“It’s a new place near the marina, a couple of clicks west.”

The six SEALs were sharing three rooms on the eighth floor with views of a broken-down playground and the sea. Crocker and Akil followed a little old man with bowed legs who was wearing a faded green tunic. After explaining to Akil that he was a state employee and hadn’t been paid in four months, he opened a door with a key and stepped aside.

“Bathroom on right,” he said in accented English.

“Thanks.”

Crocker set down his bag and heard running water. Thought maybe the toilet was broken. Turning his head toward the shower door, he saw a naked woman. Dark-haired. Attractive.

Seeing him, she screamed and attempted to cover herself.

“Excuse me,” he said, backing out. “Wrong room.”

After two more attempts the bellhop found an empty one—empty except for the half-eaten chicken someone had left behind in the wastebasket. The bellhop took care of that, for which he was tipped five U.S. dollars.

“At your service, sir. At your very excellent service,” he repeated bowing and backing out the door.

Thirty minutes later they were sitting outside by the pool, drinking warm sodas. The bartender explained that the ice maker wasn’t working, and beer and other alcoholic beverages weren’t permitted in the hotel. In fact, the consumption, production, and importation of alcohol was illegal in Libya.

As he stared at the pool, which was filled with dark, dirty water, Crocker wondered how Holly was getting along in Egypt, which shared a border with Libya to the east. He remembered the first time they had met, when they were both married to other people, their first date at a little Italian restaurant in Virginia Beach, the dress she was wearing, her lustrous dark eyes and hair, her strength of character in dealing with various family tragedies, and the vacations they’d been on together—cave diving in Mexico, whitewater rafting on the Colorado River, surfing in Hawaii, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.

Even after a decade of marriage, it lifted his spirits to think of her.

“You think they clean it for the summer?” Davis asked, jerking Crocker out of his thoughts.

“Clean what?”

“The pool.”

“Beats me.”

Mancini reported that the restaurants and nightlife in Tripoli were reputed to be less than great. And since the war they were probably a notch lower. He, Cal, and Ritchie decided to follow Akil to the old section of the city, which was within walking distance, where they figured they’d find some decent local dishes—
utshu
(a ball of dough in a bowl of sauce), couscous
, m’batten
(a fried potato stuffed with meat and herbs).

“Stay out of trouble,” Crocker warned.

“Fat chance.”

Davis chose to accompany Crocker. They were in the same black SUV, with Mustafa at the wheel and Doug Volman in the passenger seat, racing through the city at breakneck speed, screeching down narrow streets. Most of the traffic lights at the intersections didn’t seem to be working, so each time they approached one it was like playing a game of chicken.

The Sheraton was just a few miles down the Corniche, the highway that paralleled the shore, but Volman took this opportunity to give them a quick tour of downtown—the old quarter, the medina, Green Square—the center of the anti-Gaddafi protests, now renamed Martyrs’ Square—the Ottoman clock tower, the Roman arch of Marcus Aurelius, the Italianate cathedral.

As they cruised the mostly empty streets, Volman offered up a running commentary from the front seat. “The whole country’s stuck in this weird form of suspended animation. No one knows what’s going to happen next. Take this city, for example. There are over two hundred different militias controlling various neighborhoods, claiming they’re trying to enforce order. Some are small neighborhood committees, others are bigger and more aggressive. You’ve got the Zintan, which controls the airport, the Misurata managing most of the refugee camps to the south.”

“They fight?” Crocker asked.

“Sometimes. NATO commanders and most U.S. embassy officials will tell you that violence is under control and the NTC is getting its act together. But most of our reps here only talk to the top guys in the NTC, who tell them what they want to hear. The reality is different. The NTC is basically trying to figure out how to divide up the revenue from the oil exports. The whole country is walking on eggshells. More and more people are showing up dead and tortured. The security situation sucks.”

“Thanks, Doug,” Davis said, “for painting such a rosy picture.”

“My parents were refugees from Hungary. They taught me to call things the way I see them, no matter how unpleasant they might be.”

Seconds after Volman said this, a peal of automatic fire echoed through the narrow streets to their left. Mustafa turned into an alley as more gunfire erupted in front of them, lighting up the night sky.

Crocker said, “It’s probably better to keep moving.”

Volman nodded. “Yeah. Let’s head back to the coast.”

Mustafa backed up and turned right, burning rubber. Volman crouched down in the passenger seat and pointed out a dark building surrounded by a high metal fence on their left.

“That used to be the women’s military academy.”

Crocker saw no women on the streets, only a handful of men who ducked into buildings and vehicles seeking cover. Storeowners quickly pulled their wares inside and closed up their shops.

The gunfire, which seemed to be coming from the south, grew closer.

“How far are we from the Sheraton?” Crocker asked. He and Davis were unarmed.

Volman’s hands trembled as he spoke. “I’m getting tired of this shit.”

“How far away are we?”

“Maybe a quarter mile.”

A huge explosion illuminated the street in front of them and lifted up the front of the SUV. It came down with a crash, tossing the four men up and down like bouncing toys.

Mustafa and Volman both lurched forward and smacked the windshield. The former started bleeding from his nose; the latter held his head and moaned. Crocker climbed over the seat to check them out. Neither wound looked serious.

“Hold your head back,” he told Mustafa. “Squeeze here,” showing him where to pinch his fingers near the bridge of his nose.

Volman complained that he couldn’t find his glasses and couldn’t see without them. Crocker pushed Mustafa to the back seat, got behind the wheel, shut off the headlights, and gunned the engine.

“Direct me to the hotel,” he shouted.

“I told you, I can’t see.”

“Help me out, Mustafa.”

“Straight ahead, sir.”

He tried several times, but couldn’t shift the vehicle out of second gear. Secondary explosions lit up the sky.

“What’s the problem?” Davis asked.

“The clutch is fucked. Keep your heads down.”

Volman said, “The Japanese embassy is nearby. We can find shelter there.”

“Forget the Japanese embassy. Direct me to the hotel.”

“Stay on this road, sir.”

Closing in on the Mediterranean, they entered a cloud of orange-gray smoke. Directly ahead of them a fire was burning. Flames shot up above the buildings and turned the sea beyond a sinister shade of red.

Off the Corniche, down a side street, Crocker saw the shattered front of what looked like a modern eight-story hotel. Three high marble arches formed what remained of the entrance.

“I smell smoke,” Volman said, poking his head up over the dashboard.

“It’s the Sheraton, sir,” Mustafa offered. “Looks like it’s been attacked.”

To the right, past smaller white guesthouses and palms, Crocker saw a marina.

“Turn this thing around and get us out of here!” Volman shouted.

Crocker drove within a hundred feet of the hotel entrance and stopped. Cars were fleeing the hotel, steering wildly. A Mercedes with a shattered windshield crashed into another Mercedes in front of it. Crocker pulled up on the sidewalk and parked. “Let’s get out here, Davis. Stick together.”

“What are you doing? What about us?”

“Wait here,” Crocker said to Volman and Mustafa. “We’ll be back.”

They ran, squeezing past cars and frenzied people streaming past. Flames rose to the left around some palm trees near the entrance. Crocker saw the burning carcass of what looked like it had once been a delivery truck near a checkpoint at the end of the block. Flames rose from several other overturned cars nearby. One had landed hood-first in a fountain.

The explosion had left a gaping hole in one corner of the building. The place looked like some huge creature had taken a bite out of it. There was shattered glass everywhere. People moaning, screaming, calling out names, asking for help in various languages—English, Dutch, Arabic, French.

Dozens poured out of the smoking structure, stepping over burnt bodies, walking, stumbling, and running in all directions. Some were injured, others looked perfectly fine except for the horrified looks on their faces. Others stared ahead blankly, like the man in a suit who staggered by with blood running down his face, calmly smoking a cigarette.