Hunt the Scorpion

Chapter Five

Crocker, limping on sore legs, followed Jim Anders through the gate of the U.S. embassy in Rabat, Morocco, muttering a silent prayer for the marine guards and other embassy personnel who had died there less than a year ago, victims of an al-Qaeda truck bomb.

He’d slept a few hours on the Gulfstream jet that had transported them from the heat of Ouarzazate to the Moroccan capital, where it was cool and green. Even though he’d just showered and shaved, he still smelled the desert on his skin.

So far he’d been given no reason why he and his men had had to quit the race. A part of him was hoping they were being ordered home.

He proceeded into the embassy building, where a marine behind ballistic glass instructed him to step around the body scanner and enter.

“Welcome, sir.” Cordial and correct. Marine security guards like him were on duty at 150 embassies and consulates around the world.

Into an elevator to the fourth floor. Crocker was somewhat disoriented. Instead of endless desert, he was walking through a narrow hall, past a blonde in a tight white skirt. The sound of her high heels clicking against the tiled floor reminded him of a scene from an old British movie with a youngish Michael Caine.

Sometimes he missed the chase, especially when he’d been away from home more than a month.

Their destination was a windowless room on the fourth floor that they accessed only after passing through a vault door, which meant they had entered the CIA station. There, Jim Anders asked a female officer to pull up some files from the server.

“Which ones?”

“Scorpion.”

“Yes, sir.” She had short brown hair and a wide face with small features. On her wrist she wore a Timex Adventure Tech Digital Compass watch like the one he’d given Holly for her fortieth birthday.

Scorpion? Crocker repeated in his head. The word intrigued him.

They sat in a room with a half dozen serious-looking men and one woman. The lights went out and images danced on a screen. Crocker recognized the puffy face of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, former dictator of Libya. He had previously seen footage of Gaddafi’s capture, sodomization, and murder, and he was familiar with some of the highlights, or low points, of his career-namely his connection to Pan Am Flight 103, which had been blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, and other acts of terror; his vanity and extravagant personal spending; and more recently his attempted rapprochement with the U.S. and his infatuation with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

He had always regarded the Libyan strongman as a very dangerous buffoon. A madman.

What he was watching now on the large monitor at the front of the room was grainy black-and-white footage of Gaddafi made in early 2011, toward the end of his forty-year reign. He knew this because of the time stamp at the bottom of the image.

“Clandestine tape of an internal meeting,” Anders remarked.

Gaddafi was dressed in a tribal robe and cap, sitting behind a big desk. He was speaking to a group of military officers in the Libyan dialect of Arabic, which Crocker couldn’t understand. He knew a few words of Arabic, enough to get by in a pinch, but this was different and delivered too fast for him to decipher.

At one point Gaddafi slapped the desk and shouted a word that sounded like ala-kurab. Even though Crocker didn’t know what the word meant, he understood it to be a threat. When Gaddafi spit out the word again, Anders punched a button on the remote control he was holding and paused the disc.

“Scorpion,” Anders said, turning to Crocker.

“What?”

“He’s threatening his enemies with ala-kurab, which means ‘scorpion.’ ”

“What enemies?”

“Anyone who opposes him-the Libyan opposition, al-Qaeda, even NATO.”

“What is Scorpion, exactly?”

“The name of Gaddafi’s WMD program, which supposedly shut down in 2004.”

“Oh.”

“He’s telling his military commanders that if NATO continues its bombing campaign and the Libyan people continue to turn against him, he’ll unleash Scorpion.”

“Which he never did.”

“No. In the end he turned out to be a romantic like Che Guevara instead of a psychopath like Stalin.”

Crocker wasn’t sure about the comparison to Che Guevara, but he got the point.

“But he’s dead, right?” he said. “So, end of story.”

“Not necessarily. If the WMDs exist, we might have a problem,” Anders countered.

“Why?”

“Because our chief there thinks that the country is about to come apart. The ambassador doesn’t agree. But we don’t want to take a chance.”

Anders pressed another button and the blurry image of a different man filled the screen-scruffy dark beard and intense eyes. At first Crocker thought he was looking at a picture of a young Gaddafi, but the nose and hair were different.

“Who we looking at?” Crocker asked.

“Anaruz Mohammed, one of Gaddafi’s illegitimate sons. He seems to have had many. Anaruz has reentered the country and has been organizing militant Gaddafi loyalists in the south.”

“What about him?”

“He’s just one of the potential threats against the Libyan transitional government, known as the National Transitional Council, which we and our allies support.”

“There are others?”

“Yes. But we think this kid is particularly dangerous.”

“Why?”

“He’s a chip off the old block.”

“In other words a delusional nut case with charisma,” one of the other officers added.

“And his mother is a Tuareg, part of a group of nomadic warriors that lives in southern Libya in a swath of desert that also runs through Niger, Chad, and Algeria. They’ve been a problem since the French colonized the area in the twenties.”

Crocker had heard of them and knew they were one of the many Berber tribes that dominated southern Libya.

A map appeared on the screen highlighting the area.

“The Tuaregs were intensely loyal to Gaddafi, because he rescued them in the early seventies when they were starving. Saved their butts. In return, they fought for him like tigers during the recent war. At least two thousand served in his army. Now they’re a concern.”

“Why?” Crocker asked.

“The NTC has been trying to wipe them out. In January there were a couple of serious battles near the village of Menaka, not far from the border with Niger.”

He pointed to a spot on the map that Crocker considered one of the most forgotten, desolate places in the world.

He asked himself, Who cares?

“The Tuaregs are under siege, so they’ve formed alliances,” Anders continued. “One is with the terrorist organization called al-Qaeda Maghreb. Another is with the Chinese. A third is with Iran.”

The mention of China and Iran got Crocker’s attention.

“Why are the Chinese and Iranians interested in a nomadic tribe in the Sahara desert?” he asked.

Anders turned and looked him in the eye. “Uranium.”

“Uranium?”

“Lots of it. Specifically, mines in northern Niger. For the last forty years they’ve been controlled by the French. But now the Chinese and their Iranian buddies want them, and they’re using the Tuaregs and al-Qaeda to extend their influence in the area.”

Crocker felt somewhat overwhelmed by all the information and wasn’t sure what Anders was getting at.

The CIA officer said, “That’s the larger strategic picture. Africa is where the terrorist action is today. Al-Qaeda sees all kinds of opportunities because of the Arab Spring and the fall of regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.”

“I get it.”

“The Libyan coalition government has been effective so far. For a number of reasons involving oil, uranium, and other strategic interests, we don’t want it to come apart.”

“I understand.”

“Recently there’s been a marked uptick in bombings, kidnappings, and reprisals in Benghazi and Tripoli. We’re not sure who’s behind them. Some people say it’s the Tuaregs, others al-Qaeda Maghreb. Maybe it’s the two of them working together. Could be that the Chinese and Iranians are stirring up trouble. There are lots of interests competing for power and a piece of the pie.”

“There always are.”

“The immediate concern for us is Scorpion, the WMDs. We want to know, one, if they do exist. And two, if they exist, we want to make sure we secure them so they don’t fall into the wrong hands.”

“Got it.”

“NATO claims to have inspected all the sites and secured the few old mustard-gas shells they found. But our chief there doesn’t believe they were thorough. The whole NATO command thing is sensitive. We don’t want to look like we’re second-guessing them or stepping on anyone’s toes.”

“Naturally.”

“But given the possible stakes, Al thinks it’s too important. And Donaldson and I agree.”

“I thought Donaldson didn’t like us,” Crocker said.

“Where’d you get that impression?”

“From him, primarily.”

“He thinks you guys are great.”

Crocker had another question. “You mentioned Al. Al who?”

“Al Cowens. He’s our station chief in Tripoli. You’ll be working closely with him. You might have to coordinate with the NATO commander there, who is a Brit. But we’re leaving that up to Al. He’s no-nonsense, like you, Crocker. I think you’ll like him.”

“I know Al,” Crocker said. “He’s a stud.”

“Oh, and one other thing. You’ll be going in undercover as American civil engineers doing a study of the city’s electrical grid.”

“Perfect.”

“Al’s idea.”

“When do you want us there?”

“Tonight, tomorrow. As soon as possible.”

Crocker’s only previous trip to Libya had occurred roughly sixteen years before, when he had run a training program for a group of anti-Gaddafi rebels, Berber tribesmen all from one extended family. They were two dozen brave men ranging in age from seventeen to seventy. After hot days showing them how to disassemble, clean, and fire AK-47s, Crocker and the two Special Forces operatives he had been sent with would sit around a fire and listen through their translator as the men told gruesome stories about tribe members who had run afoul of the Gaddafi regime.

One man had refused to sell his farmland to one of the strongman’s cronies. He and his entire family were rounded up and tortured. As Gaddafi’s friends watched, men and women were raped, then the men’s genitals were hacked off and the women were blinded.

After Crocker left he learned that the entire clan he’d worked with had been captured and killed. The memory left a bad taste in his mouth.

The Libyan Arab Airlines jet he and his men rode in banked over the Mediterranean. Tripoli, a sparkling gold crescent of concrete and glass in the light of the setting sun, glittered below.

Mancini, in the seat behind him, leaned forward and recited some facts. “It’s a city of almost two million. Founded way back in the seventh century BC by the Phoenicians. They were essentially an alliance of city-states that controlled the area around Lebanon and Israel from about 1200 to 800 BC. Big traders. Loved the color purple, which they considered royal, and they got it from the mucus of the murex sea snail.”

“The murex sea snail?” Akil groaned. “Too much information.”

“Ignorance is dangerous, Akil,” Mancini retorted. “Remember that.”

“So is clogging up your brain with trivial crap.”

The old DC-727’s landing gear groaned into place as the female flight attendants tied scarves around their heads.

“History isn’t trivial,” Mancini said. “Those who don’t learn from it are destined to repeat it.”

“Thanks, professor. Now shut the fuck up.”

The plane hit the runway like a bag of bolts and jerked right.

“Check this out,” Davis said, lifting the carpet and pointing to a six-inch-diameter hole in the floor near his seat. Through it they could see the runway flying by.

“Nice.”

Stepping off the plane, they were hit by a blast of fresh Mediterranean air pungent with spices and mixed with jet fuel.

Ritchie asked, “Didn’t we bomb this shithole in the eighties?”

“That was Mitiga Airport, east of the city, near Gaddafi’s former stronghold,” Mancini interjected. “Nineteen eighty-six, to be exact. Part of Operation El Dorado Canyon launched by President Ronald Reagan.”

“Bombed his tent, too,” Ritchie added.

“That’s right. Gaddafi barely escaped. Turned out he was forewarned by some Italian politician.”

“Fucking asshole.”

Shifting loyalties. The Libyans were now our friends. They were also one of the top oil-producing countries in the world, exporting approximately 1.2 million barrels of crude a day, 80 percent of which went to Europe. Violence and instability there meant an increase in gas and heating oil prices back home.

The terminal was dark and relatively empty. All the green flags once flown by Gaddafi’s Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya had been replaced with the black, red, and green of the NTC. Soldiers in green camouflage uniforms holding AK-47s patrolled the building. Some were wearing sneakers and sandals; others were equipped with boots. They looked more like gang members than members of a disciplined army.

After a period of contemplation, Gaddafi proclaimed the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and released the first volume of The Green Book, which outlined his concept of direct democracy with no political parties. The country thereafter would be governed by its populace through local popular councils and communes. A General People’s Committee (GPCO) would serve as the country’s executive cabinet.

Gaddafi resigned as the head of the General People’s Congress (GPC) and was thereafter known as the Leader of the Revolution. But it was really all a ruse. Absolute power still rested with him as supreme commander of the armed forces and the embodiment of what Gaddafi called direct people’s power. The popular councils (also known as revolutionary committees) were used to spy on the population and repress any opposition to Gaddafi’s autocratic rule.

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.

The torso of a uniformed man lay in the street. His arms and legs had been blown off. His head was a gory mess of brains and shattered bone.

Crocker expected sirens but heard none.

As they approached the entrance, gunfire rang out. People jumped behind trees and walls or threw themselves to the pavement. Crocker and Davis crouched behind a planter overflowing with red bougainvillea.

“Sounds like the shots are coming from inside,” Davis shouted.

“That’s odd,” Crocker said, looking for soldiers or security guards and finding none.

“Real odd.”

“Maybe we should circle around back.”

They rose together and almost tripped over a stout middle-aged woman holding up a bleeding man. The man’s face was injured.

The woman screamed in a language Crocker didn’t understand. The man stumbled and grabbed his neck.

With Davis’s help, Crocker sat the man down on the ground, against the wall of the entrance. Then he started to reach down his throat.

The woman shouted, “No! No!” shaking her head, slipping into hysteria.

Crocker nodded at Davis, who held her back.

The man’s windpipe was blocked with blood and broken teeth. Crocker swept them free and fished them out of his mouth. The man coughed and started to breathe normally. The gash across his cheek and mouth was serious but not life threatening.

With no medical kit available, Crocker removed his own black polo shirt and held it against the man’s face. Then he grabbed the woman’s hand. “Hold this here and wait for an ambulance. Your husband will be okay.”

“Wait?”

“Attendez,” Crocker said, remembering one of the few words he knew in French.

“Attendez, oui.” She nodded her head, then kissed his cheek.

The firing from inside had picked up. More people were running out in panic. Some wore uniforms; some men, suits. Women were clothed in cocktail gowns and dresses. Many of them abandoned their high heels, which littered the tile floor.

Crocker saw someone who looked American and stopped him.

“Where’s the party for the NATO chief?”

“The party?”

“Yeah. Where’s Al Cowens?”

“Out of my way!”

Crocker grabbed him firmly by the shoulders. “Al Cowens from the U.S. embassy? You know him?”

“Don’t go in there! Men are shooting. Lots of dead. It’s fucked.”

He entered the building with Davis at his side. The lobby was littered with the injured and bleeding. Blood was smeared everywhere. A lot of the lights were out. Smoke. A Muzak version of “Copacabana” by Barry Manilow played over the PA, adding a surreal element.

People were screaming, moaning, crashing into things, asking for help.

The two SEALs followed the sound of gunfire past the lobby, down a hall to the other end of the building. Turning left, they entered what looked to be a brasserie-type restaurant that faced a pool and, beyond that, the beach.

Because it stood at the back of the building, the restaurant seemed to have escaped damage from the explosion, but tables had been overturned and people were hiding behind them. He saw bodies in the corners.

“What the-”

Before he could complete his question, an explosion threw Crocker against the back wall.

He landed on his right shoulder, picked himself up, and found Davis near a banquette, holding his head, looking woozy.

“You okay?”

No answer.

“Davis, can you hear me?”

He couldn’t. So Crocker did a quick inspection of his head and neck. Saw no external injuries, but his eyes were dilated and unfocused, indicating that he might have suffered a concussion.

There wasn’t anything Crocker could do for him now. He said, “Wait here.”

Gunshots went off and ricocheted off the walls and floor. Glass flew everywhere. People screamed. He ducked behind a table and slithered on his belly through air thick with the smell of cordite and smoke.

Reaching two NATO soldiers in light blue uniforms who lay in a heap along the right wall, he discovered that neither was breathing or had a pulse. He relieved them of their weapons-some sort of automatic pistol from one, an MP5 with a collapsible stock from the other. Both were loaded and seemingly in working order.

He peered through the shattered windows facing the back and saw men by the pool spraying the brasserie with bullets from automatic weapons held at their hips. Rambo-style, he thought. Black turbans, scarves hiding their faces.

Fucking cowards!

He watched a bearded man in a black T-shirt remove the pin of a grenade with his teeth. Before he had a chance to throw it, Crocker took aim and cut him down at the knees. The man fell backward as the grenade exploded, throwing him into the pool.

When the smoke cleared, he saw the man’s legless body floating next to a woman who was facedown in the blue water. Her dress billowed out like large pink fins.

Holly’s image flashed in his head, reminding him that the dead woman in the pool was someone’s wife or girlfriend. This added to his rage.

Sons of bitches!

Spotting the shadows of the armed men retreating, he aimed and fired. One man stumbled and slid. Crocker ran across the patio to the far side of the pool, knelt on the terra-cotta tiles, and fired again. A group of attackers had turned right and were running in the direction of the marina. Crocker suspected that a boat or truck was waiting to pick them up and help them escape. He wasn’t going to let that happen.

Smoke rising from the fire behind him, he brought down two of them with bursts from the MP5. A little dark-skinned teenager in a sleeveless T-shirt crouched beside him and toppled another. The scrawny teenager turned to Crocker, smiled with a mouthful of jumbled and broken teeth, and flashed a thumbs-up. He had big eyes that caught the light. Beside him were three other young men, all dressed in T-shirts and jeans. The black tee of one had SURFER printed on it. They were holding AKs that looked almost as big as they were.

Crocker had no time to ask them who they were and which group they were affiliated with. He was glad that, like him, they were trying to stop the terrorists, who probably outnumbered them three to one.

A helicopter circled around the hotel tower and swooped over the water. Its spotlight illuminated roughly a dozen men armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades escaping down the beach. One of them stopped, took aim at the helicopter, and fired his RPG before Crocker could take him down. The rocket whooshed and smashed into the copter’s side. The resulting explosion splashed everything with white light and numbed Crocker’s ears. The copter’s rear rotor continued spinning in the sky as the cockpit plummeted into the sea.

Pieces of hot shrapnel screamed through the air, stuck in the sand around them. One of the teenagers fell. He started moaning and kicking wildly.

“Where was he hit?” Crocker asked.

One of the other teens ran over to help his injured friend and was struck in the back by a volley of bullets.

Crocker shouted, “Stay down! Stay down!” as he lay facedown in the sand and returned fire. He asked himself, “Where is security? Where the fuck is NATO? How come we’re the only ones shooting back?”

The attackers fired rockets in their direction, then retreated. One exploded in the sand in front of Crocker. Others screeched over his head.

He got up, spit out the grit in his mouth, and gave chase. But when he stopped to fire, the mag in the MP5 ran out. He didn’t have another. When he tried to fire the pistol, it jammed.

“Piece of shit!”

Still he gave chase. Reaching the first fallen attacker, he kicked him in the face, then relieved him of his AK, which was still hot.

The sand was a bitch to run in. Made him remember his younger brother and how they used to play on the beach when they were kids. His brother now owned several car dealerships north of Boston. Meanwhile, he was halfway around the world getting shot at by terrorists.

Nearing the marina, he sensed someone running beside him. It was the kid in the sleeveless T-shirt with the big eyes and uneven teeth.

Who is he?

Sounds of chaos continued beyond his shoulder. He knelt and fired at the attackers ahead who were jumping on motorcycles and climbing into the back of a pickup parked alongside the marina. Bullets skidded off the pavement and slammed into the cab of the truck. The kid beside him hit the rider of one of the motorcycles in the chest.

“Good shot!”

The bike spun, hit the curb with an eruption of sparks, and threw its rider into the bushes along the canal.

Crocker ran over and righted the bike. Jumped on and gunned the engine.

The kid sprinted to the canal, shot the rider again, then jumped on the back. A smooth customer.

Pointing the motorcycle toward the Corniche, Crocker pulled back on the throttle. The bike roared and took off.

For the first time he heard sirens approaching, which pleased him.

Finally!

But the bike wouldn’t pick up speed. He heard scraping from the back wheel.

Maybe the axle is messed up.

He got about fifty yards down the Corniche and stopped, his heart pounding.

“Motherfuckers!”

He looked at the kid with the big eyes and the tangle of dark hair that stood straight up.

The kid grinned and repeated, “Mutha-fukka.”

They knelt on the pavement and fired until they ran out of ammo. Then hurried together back across the beach to where the kid’s two buddies were lying. The one who was shot in the back had bled out and was dead, but the other was still breathing. Crocker removed the kid’s SURFER T-shirt and pressed it against two bullet holes near his hip.

“Hold it there until we can get him to a hospital. He’ll be okay.”

The kid with the big eyes grinned and raised his thumb. He was a brave little guy, whoever he was.

Pointing to his chest, he said, “Farag.”

“Tom Crocker. I’m going to help the people inside.”

“Very good. Good man.”

“Good luck, Farag. And thanks.”

Back in the brasserie, Crocker spent the next hour giving CPR and trying to clear airways and stop bleeding, using towels and pillows and the pathetically meager emergency medical supplies on hand. People were missing hands, parts of legs. They’d been shot in every place imaginable, struck with shrapnel, burned.

His hands and arms were covered with blood, and he was wrapping a sock around a man’s arm as a tourniquet when someone tapped him on the shoulder. Turning, he saw a NATO doctor and nurse standing behind him, light blue masks over their faces.

Emergency lights were now burning, powered by a portable generator, and he saw the room clearly for the first time. The scene was gruesome. Blood smeared everywhere. Piles of bodies. Reminded him of a documentary he’d once watched about a slaughterhouse in Chicago.

At least the wounded were being carried out on stretchers. Nurses, paramedics, and doctors were taking charge, directing armor-clad NATO soldiers.

“Have you seen Al Cowens?” he asked.

Someone pointed to a pile of bodies near the far wall.

“Really?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Which one?”

The man shrugged.

He searched and found Cowens near the bottom, the top left side of his head and face missing, and his tongue hanging out. Crocker sat on the floor, rested his back against the wall, and covered his face with his hands, exhausted. Completely spent. “It isn’t Al,” he mumbled to himself. “It’s just his body. Al, rest his soul, has hopefully gone to a better place. God bless him.”