Hunt the Scorpion

Chapter Eight

The next morning Crocker rose early, drove to the beach, and ran ten miles in the sand. Reminded him of BUD/S and of being back home in eastern Virginia. He passed men standing in the surf fishing, a family walking their dog, women covered from head to toe collecting shells. Despite what Volman had said about Libyans being the friendliest people in the world, the ones he saw seemed frightened and on edge.

Maybe on Saturday he’d take Holly to the Roman ruins at Leptis Magna, two hours east. According to Mancini it was a UNESCO World Heritage Site and remained one of the best-preserved Roman cities in the world, with a triumphal arch in honor of Emperor Septimius Severus, a theater built in the second century BC, a forum, baths, a basilica, and more. The city had been founded by the Phoenicians and became a prosperous Roman commercial center until it was sacked by a Berber tribe in AD 523.

They could pack a picnic lunch and spend the day exploring the ruins by themselves. Maybe stop for a swim afterward. Make love on the beach.

Back at the guesthouse he sat with his men in the living room listening to a briefing by Jaime Remington and an officer from the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German equivalent of the CIA)-a tall, fit woman named Sandra Lundquist. She reminded him of a taller, slimmer, slightly older Scarlett Johansson, which explained why Ritchie and Akil were staring at her like she was lunch.

Crocker listened as Lundquist spoke in a dry, almost monotone voice, a stark contrast to her ripe sexuality. He knew they would be leaving in an hour to inspect a chemical plant near the border with Niger, 450 miles south. She explained that the BND had already inspected the facility, which was a few kilometers north of the town of Toummo. Built in the 1980s with the help of a dozen German, Italian, Soviet, and French companies-including Pen Tsao, Ihsan Barbouti, and Imhausen-Chemie-the plant almost immediately raised international suspicion. The Libyan government claimed it was being used to manufacture medicine and other consumer products, but soon it was discovered that the German company Imhausen-Chemie had been shipping chemical weapons equipment to Libya, using Hong Kong as a cover.

On August 3, 1987, SPOT satellite pictures confirmed that the plant, then known as Pharma 150, had been completed. Considered the largest chemical weapons facility in the Third World, at full capacity it could produce one hundred metric tons of sarin nerve gas a year. The Libyans had also constructed a metal fabrication plant nearby to produce bombs and artillery shells designed specifically to deliver chemical agents.

“Didn’t the Reagan administration threaten to bomb Pharma 150 in the late eighties if it wasn’t shut down?” Mancini asked.

“You’re correct,” Sandra said. “But before they had a chance to, the Libyan government claimed that a fire set by the United States had destroyed the plant. However, satellite imagery indicated only minor damage.”

“So the fire was a hoax.”

“That was the conclusion of your CIA, yes. Again the Reagan administration threatened to destroy it. In late 1990, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi announced that he was shutting the plant down, but not before it had produced an estimated hundred tons of mustard blister agent and sarin nerve gas.”

“Sneaky bastard.”

“The site was reopened in 1995 as a pharmaceutical plant, jointly run with Egypt’s El Nasr Pharmaceutical Chemicals Company, designed to produce medicines, detergents, and cleansers,” Sandra continued. “But we concluded that it was still capable of making chemical weapons.”

Ritchie: “Why am I not surprised?”

“In 2004, Libya signed the Chemical Weapons Convention. But leaked classified cables from Gaddafi’s government proved that they were not in compliance and still possessed 9.5 metric tons of mustard gas, an unknown quantity of phosgene gas, and sarin nerve agent, most of which was stored at Pharma 150.”

Ritchie: “We should have leveled it back in the eighties.”

Crocker asked, “What’s the status of the facility now?”

“An Italian company called SIPSA Engineering has been pressuring the interim government to sign a contract for destruction of all chemical agents at Pharma 150. So far the contract hasn’t been signed,” Lundquist answered.

“So what’s our mission?” Crocker asked.

Remington leaned forward and answered, “One, make sure the chemical weapons stored there are secure. Two, inspect the nearby metal fabrication plant. We know that it hasn’t been open for years, but as far as I know, no one has eyeballed that particular plant in years, either.”

Lundquist said, “I’ve been there as recently as two months ago. There’s nothing to see at the metal fabrication plant. Ruins, a shed that some locals use to store grain, not much.”

Remington: “Dr. Jabril won’t be going with you, but he drew up a map of the fabrication plant. He says he helped run it back in the nineties.”

“Where’s Lasher?” Crocker asked.

“He and the doctor are out interviewing some former Gaddafi scientists.”

“And the city is safe?” Crocker asked.

“Toummo? It’s hardly a city. Barely qualifies as a village. It’s a desert border town. NATO has a base there to guard the uranium mines nearby. There’ve been some recent skirmishes with local tribesmen, raids across the border, but the Polish commander, Major Ostrowski, is firmly in charge. He’ll be your host.”

As Akil, Mancini, Davis, and Ritchie loaded their gear into the Suburban for the trip to the airport, Remington pulled Crocker into the kitchen.

“Keep close to Ms. Lundquist,” Remington said.

“That won’t be a problem. But…why?”

“She was attacked in the old quarter a couple of nights ago. A group of young men tried to force her into a car. She fought them off but is still a bit shaken.”

The Royal Canadian Air Force CC-130 took off with a roar that afternoon with Crocker and Mancini in the first row of seats; Davis, Akil, and Ritchie occupying the middle row; and Sandra Lundquist stretched out in the back row by herself. The space behind her was filled with jugs of water, propane tanks, and other supplies for the NATO camp. When she wasn’t talking on her cell phone she was typing on her laptop, frustrating Akil and Ritchie’s attempts to engage her in conversation. So they started ribbing Davis about getting his wife pregnant twice in less than a year.

Ritchie asked, “You ever hear about pulling out?”

Akil: “He can’t. He’s too quick.”

Ritchie: “You’ve got to learn to prolong it, enjoy it. Right, Manny?”

Mancini: “What do you two know about heterosexual love?”

Then they tried to get her attention by telling off-color jokes.

“Hey, you hear the one about the woman at home who hears a knock on her front door? She answers and sees a man standing there who asks: ‘Do you have a vagina?’ She slams the door in disgust. The next morning she hears another knock on the door. It’s the same man who asks, ‘Do you have a vagina?’ She slams the door again. That night when her husband gets home, she tells him what happened the last two days. Her husband tells his wife in a loving and concerned voice, ‘Honey, I’m staying home from work tomorrow, in case this idiot shows up again.’ The next morning, sure enough, there’s a knock on the door. The husband whispers to the wife, ‘I’ll hide behind the door. If he asks you the same question, answer yes.’ She opens the door and sure enough, the same man is standing there. He asks again, ‘Do you have a vagina?’ She answers yes. The man replies, ‘Good. Then would you mind telling your husband to leave my wife’s alone and start using yours?’ ”

The men all laughed, Mancini so hard he started to choke.

Akil asked, “You like that one, Sandra?”

“Not bad.”

“You’re hard to please.”

Mancini: “How about this? There was this older guy who wanted to make his younger wife pregnant. So he went to the doctor to have a sperm count done. The doc tells him to take a specimen cup home, fill it up, and bring it back the next day. The next day the old guy comes back. The specimen cup’s empty and the lid’s still on it. The doctor asks, ‘What was the problem?’ The old guy says, ‘Well, I tried with my right hand…nothing. So I tried with my left. That didn’t work, either. Then my wife took over. She tried with her right, then her left, then her mouth. Each time…nothing. Then my wife’s friend tried. Right hand, left hand, mouth. Still nothing.’ Hearing this, the doctor said, ‘Wait a minute. Your wife’s friend tried, too?’ ‘That’s right,’ the old man answered. ‘None of us could get the lid off the specimen cup.’ ”

Sandra laughed this time and said, “I like that one better.”

Akil leaned over the seat and asked, “What about you, Sandra? You know any good jokes?”

Crocker was about to change the subject, but the German seemed game.

She shut her laptop and said, “Three guys go to a ski lodge, and there aren’t enough rooms, so they have to share a bed. In the middle of the night the guy sleeping on the right wakes up and says, ‘I just had this wild, very vivid dream about getting a hand job.’ The guy on the left says, ‘That’s funny. I had the same dream.’ The guy in the middle says, ‘Not me. I dreamt I was skiing.’ ”

They laughed, then Ritchie said, “The guy in the middle was Davis!”

Davis: “Grow up, Ritchie.”

“Never. Fuck you.”

Crocker: “Okay, guys. Settle down. We’re almost there.”

After a little more than four hours in the air, the CC-130 started to descend. All Crocker could see out the side windows was a thin ribbon of highway surrounded by desert. When the plane passed a few hundred feet over a collection of what looked like shacks on either side of the highway, Sandra said, “That’s it. That’s Toummo.”

Akil: “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Looks like the end of the earth, yes?”

As soon as the plane touched down on a landing strip alongside the NATO base, Polish soldiers arrived in trucks and started unloading the supplies. Crocker and the others exited out the side door and were greeted by a big man with enormous arms and a broad chest wearing an olive-green tank top and camouflage shorts.

He said in English, “I’m Major Ostrowski. Welcome to our base. Officially, it’s known as Base Toummo, but we call it Base Piasek Burza. Or you might prefer the English translation, Base Sandstorm.”

The camp housed two dozen soldiers and was roughly two hundred feet square, surrounded by a ten-foot-high wall of sand, gravel, rock, Conex containers, and sheets of metal. Inside were tents, mud buildings, lookout towers, picnic tables, electric generators, an oven, showers, a latrine, a pen filled with goats, and a barbecue pit.

The major showed them to their quarters-cell-like rooms in a mud-walled structure with a corrugated metal roof. Tiny windows allowed very little air to circulate, so even though the sun had set, the quarters continued to be stifling.

Two men were assigned to a room, except for Crocker and Sandra, who each got their own.

Crocker said, “You can give mine to someone else. I’d rather sleep outside.”

“Not a good idea,” the major answered, scratching the bristle of light brown hair on his square sunburned head. “For the past seven nights the tribesmen have been shelling us. Terrible aim, but maybe they get lucky.”

The major seemed to view the recent fighting as no big deal.

“Are these Tuareg tribesmen you’re talking about?” Crocker asked, knowing that they populated the area.

“Tuareg. Yes.”

“What do they want?”

“Control of the open-pit uranium mines, what else? That way they can sell the ore to Iran and China.”

“And the mines are close by?”

“About seventy kilometers northwest of us, past the town and deeper into Libyan territory.”

“That far?” Crocker asked.

“The terrain makes it hard to get to them if you don’t take the road. In my opinion, the camp’s too close. The dust is going to make all be radioactive by the time we leave. Already my penis glows in the dark.”

That night, after dining on roast goat and couscous, and watching the movie Iron Man dubbed in Polish, they retired to their quarters. Soon after Crocker lay down he heard the first mortar land and shake the ground. Shards of shrapnel rained onto the metal roof. Then the NATO troops returned fire with machine guns and artillery of their own.

Enemy shells continued to land intermittently through the night and into the morning breakfast of yogurt, goat cheese, figs, and tea. As Crocker and his team ate, Polish soldiers shouted instructions to one another as they prepared their weapons and put on body armor.

Akil: “Imagine being assigned to this place.”

Ritchie: “I’ve been in worse.”

Akil: “When?”

Ritchie: “November 2004, Fallujah, Iraq. The whole damn city turned against us. We were getting attacked from all sides.”

Sandra looked miserable. She said the percussion of the mortar shells hurt her head.

After breakfast a sweaty, heavily armed Ostrowski led them to a Polish AMZ Dzik armored truck parked in the courtyard. He leaned toward Crocker and said, “Today we’re going to have some fun with these asshole tribesmen.”

The major introduced them to a Polish corporal who said he knew the way to the chemical plant. But a half hour later, as they sped north on the highway through the dusty, sun-baked town of Toummo, Sandra told him she thought he’d missed the turnoff.

The driver turned the vehicle around and veered left on a dirt road that led them past a little school, primitive houses, a pen filled with camels and goats, and up a gradual incline where the road seemed to end.

“Keep going,” Sandra instructed.

When they reached an eighty-foot mound of rock, dirt, and sand, Sandra told the driver to steer around it. On the other side they met a ten-foot wall of rock and sand.

Sandra said, “Stop here. This is where we get out.”

Akil: “You sure?”

There was nothing but sand everywhere they looked. She walked ahead, all business, her tight black shorts accentuating her long legs and feminine curves.

Ritchie leaned toward Crocker and whispered, “What do you think?”

Crocker shrugged, “She seems to know where she’s going.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

They watched her climb the ten-foot wall of dirt, then turn back and wave at them to join her.

Upon reaching the top, Crocker looked down and saw a large compound that had been dug into the earth. The whole plant was surrounded by walls of sandbags. It contained at least a dozen buildings, distillation and cooling tanks, and a concrete road that ran the length of the site. The road and roofs of the buildings had been painted with desert camouflage so they would be hard to see from above. Reminded him of a scene from the movie Andromeda Strain: perfectly preserved buildings, but no people.

“Clever, isn’t it?” Sandra asked, her blond hair whipping in the wind.

“Very clever,” Crocker answered.

According to the thermometer on his watch, the temperature had soared to over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot gusts of wind kicked up angry twirls of dust.

Ritchie spotted a snake resting in the shade of the fence and picked it up with the barrel of his MP5.

“Don’t mess around,” Davis, who hated snakes, warned. Years earlier Ritchie had thrown a dead rattlesnake into Davis’s sleeping bag and freaked him out.

“It’s a sand viper,” Mancini said, examining the marking around its head. “Highly venomous.”

Ritchie waved it in front of Davis’s face, then tossed it over his shoulder.

When they rattled the chain on the gate, a stooped man with one eye emerged from a shed with an old M1 Garand rifle slung over his shoulder. He explained to Akil that he was a member of the NTC militia.

“Tell him we have permission from the prime minister to inspect the site.”

Akil spoke Arabic to the man, who nodded respectfully.

“He says a team from Germany arrived here months ago and locked away all the chemicals.”

“I know,” Sandra responded. “I was with them. Tell him we want to look around, make sure nothing has been touched.”

As the guard removed a key from under his tunic, the sky started to darken. Crocker looked at his watch. It was only 1 p.m. local time. “Looks like a storm’s approaching. Grab the goggles from the truck. Make sure everyone has a scarf.”

Akil ran off and came back as a big red cloud of sand and dust started to build around them.

Crocker said, “Keep your nose, mouth, and eyes covered. Everyone stick together.”

The one-eyed guard led them down the main road past modern buildings and equipment that had been partially covered with sand. At the end of the drive stood a sand-colored water tower. Past that was a storage shed filled with red, green, and orange barrels.

“You know what’s in them?” Crocker asked.

“Machine oil and other harmless chemicals,” Sandra answered. She was wearing stylish yellow goggles.

The guard turned and beckoned them with a finger. Just then a gust of sand hit the shed, almost lifting off its roof. It pounded the water tower. More gusts followed.

Akil shouted, “He’s leading us to an underground chamber.”

“Where?”

“Follow me!”

They walked in a cluster, pushing through the wind, to a concrete ramp with a set of steps beside it. At the bottom was a metal door that was bolted shut and locked. Pasted on it were warnings in Arabic, French, and English.

Sandra: “This is the same one we inspected two months ago.”

“Who has the keys?” Crocker asked.

“NATO command,” Sandra shouted over the wind. “We’re waiting for the toxic materials to be removed and disposed of.”

“Who’s responsible for that?”

“The NTC.”

“Alright,” Crocker said turning to Akil. “Show the guard the map Dr. Jabril drew of the metal fabrication plant. Tell him we want to take a look at that, too.”

The man studied the map as fine dust swirling around them made it hard to breathe. Sandra appeared to be suffering. Ritchie wrapped his kaffiyeh around her head.

Crocker said, “Hand her a bottle of water. Make sure she wets the scarf and ties it over her nose and mouth.” Then he turned to Akil and shouted over the roar, “What did the guard say?”

“He says part of the facility is destroyed. What’s left of it is on the other side of the hill.”

“How far?”

“Five minutes at the most.”

“Let’s wait down here.”

After twenty minutes the wind started to abate. Crocker said, “Sandra, why don’t you stay here with Ritchie? We’re gonna go look at the metal plant, then come back.”

He turned to Akil, who looked disappointed, and said, “Let’s go.”

It was like midnight, with dust and sand swirling everywhere. Crocker, Mancini, Davis, and Akil tried to keep up with the guard, but he was fast, scrambling up the embankment and hanging a right, then circling a mound of sand whose top they couldn’t see.

“Where’d he go?” Davis asked.

Akil: “Beats me.”

Crocker located him near a forty-foot-long rectangular building, waving his scarf. Through the clouds of dust it appeared that windows were broken and the roof had partially caved in.

The guard smiled with broken teeth, then led them around the other side of the building to another stairway and ramp that descended into the ground. The door to this chamber was blocked by sand, so they had to clear it by hand. Then Mancini went to work on the rusted lock with his electric saw.

Inside they found napalm bombs and white phosphorus shells that Akil was able to identify by the warnings painted on them in Arabic. The SEALs had no way of telling how long they’d been there, or if they were still live.

They did a quick inventory, then wrapped the chain around the door and fixed it with a new Sargent and Greenleaf hardened-boron-alloy lock, which was almost impossible to pick, saw, or cut with a torch.

Crocker turned to Davis and said, “Run back to the truck and use the sat-phone to call Remington. Tell him what we found.”

“Yes, sir.”

They left the site as the storm started to pick up again, negotiating what they could see of the road until they found the highway.

Feeling a sense of accomplishment, the five men and one woman told stories and joked as the Polish driver struggled to keep the vehicle on the road through the wind and sand. Most of the stories had to do with their various scrapes with the law. Crocker’s were the most outrageous-numerous arrests for fighting, drunk driving, and resisting arrest as a wild teenager growing up in northern Massachusetts.

Sandra’s one legal infraction was less serious but far more provocative-a misdemeanor charge for nude sunbathing. All of them quickly imagined it, including Crocker, who said, “That cop was an idiot.”

“Yeah,” Ritchie said, “he should have left an ideal situation alone.”

By the time they arrived back at the NATO base the wind had let up and the sky had turned a strange shade of purple. When the truck turned into the compound, Crocker saw Major Ostrowski and his soldiers unloading a group of five prisoners from the back of two SPG Kalina armored personnel carriers.

“We used the storm to surprise them,” the major crowed. “While they keep shelling the base, me and my men circled around and attacked them from behind. Killed about a dozen and captured these guys.”

Crocker noticed that one of the tribesmen was badly wounded in the chest. He and Akil carried him into the compound, where they applied blowout patches. But the kid had lost so much blood that all they could do was try to comfort him as he spent his last minutes clutching the large silver amulet that hung around his neck and praying.

Afterward they joined the major, who loomed over the prisoners sitting on the ground looking hungry, thirsty, and scared. Ostrowski ordered his men to bring water and bread. Then he turned to Akil and said, “Tell the prisoners I’ll let them eat and drink, and will treat them well, if they answer a few of my questions. Otherwise I’ll drop them in the middle of the desert to be eaten by buzzards.”

The tribesmen whispered among themselves. Then one skinny kid spoke in a high, shrill voice. He told Akil that he and his fellow tribesmen were all under the age of twenty, and were simply trying to recover land and property that had previously belonged to their families. They had no beef with NATO, he said, and were not the men responsible for shelling the base.

“Bullshit,” the major said. “I suppose their property includes the uranium mines, yes? Who do they consider the enemy?”

“The NTC and the Arab radicals who overthrew Gaddafi.”

“Who supplies them with guns and ammunition?”

“The Iranians,” the man said to Akil, who translated his words into English.

“See?” Ostrowski said, turning to Crocker. “What did I tell you?”

Crocker: “Ask him if there are any Iranians over the border in Niger.”

The young man nodded and held up the fingers on one hand.

Ostrowski: “Ask the little man if he knows the name of the Iranian in charge.”

Akil said, “He doesn’t know the man’s full name. They call him Colonel D.”

Crocker stepped closer to the prisoner. “Is Colonel D a short man with a badly scarred face and hooded eyes?”

After Akil translated, the young tribesmen nodded.

“Colonel D is the alias of Farhed Alizadeh of the Qods Force,” Crocker stated.

Akil: “Isn’t he the guy you saw when we raided the Contessa? The one who escaped?”

“That’s him.”

They flew out on the same RCAF CC-130 early the next morning, accompanied by the four surviving prisoners and two Polish guards. Back in Tripoli, Sandra said she was returning to Germany in two days and hoped not to return to Libya anytime soon.

“We’ll always have Toummo,” Akil said, paraphrasing a line from Casablanca.

Sandra shook her head and smiled.

Crocker had a lot on his mind, including the news about Farhed Alizadeh, which he wanted to report to Remington. But Holly came first.

As soon as he and his men returned to the guesthouse, he called the embassy. Knocking out the rhythm to “Lonely Boy,” the Black Keys song playing in the living room, he waited for Leo Debray to get on the line.

“So tell me, Leo,” Crocker asked, “where is she staying?”

“Holly?”

“Who else?”

“Holly’s not here yet,” Debray answered in an official tone of voice.

“Why? What happened?”

“Nothing happened, really. She and Brian never arrived.”

Crocker sensed something wrong. “What do you mean, they never arrived? I thought they were supposed to land here this morning. Was the flight delayed again?”

“I don’t know.”

He felt his blood pressure rocket up. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I mean the flight did land earlier today, and they weren’t on it. Why, we don’t know. We’ve tried to contact them but don’t know where they are. We haven’t heard from them since last night.”

He felt like he’d been kicked in the balls. Trying to breathe normally, he said, “You’re telling me my wife is missing?”

“I’m sorry to report that’s more or less correct.”

He wanted to say that things like this weren’t supposed to happen to American officials traveling overseas. Instead he looked out the window and asked, “Holly doesn’t have a cell phone with her?”

“She has one but isn’t answering. We’ve left numerous messages but so far have received no calls back.”

“What about Brian?”

“Same thing.”

“And the last place you heard from them was Sirte?”

“That’s correct. Last night, like I told you.”

“You don’t have any people there who can check on them?”

“Not in Sirte.”

“How come?”

“Because the city was almost completely destroyed during the war.”