Hunt the Scorpion (7 page)

Day three was a bitch, with endless dunes as far as the eye could see. The sand somehow seemed softer and deeper than before. It crumpled as soon as you touched it and caused them to sink halfway up to their knees with each footfall. Crocker felt he was about to hit a wall but refused to stop. He had to set an example for his men.

The sun burned through his Adidas Explorer sunglasses. The heat pounded his shoulders and neck.

He started to feel light-headed, then felt something touch his hand. It was a blond girl in a blue bikini. Her stride was strong and sure. They were walking down the beach together. He felt water lapping at his feet.

He turned to kiss her. “Kim?”

His first wife smiled and pushed back her hair.

“Hey, Kim.”

“You okay, boss?”

It was Ritchie, with his head and face wrapped in a white scarf.

Crocker thought he heard music as they approached the day’s destination, a little desert town called Tazzarine. Turned out the music was real. A local band played enthusiastically as girls danced in circles and shook tambourines. They ate lamb couscous for dinner and immediately passed out.

The next morning the sky was cloudy, and one of the organizers warned him that a storm was approaching. Crocker told his men to stick together. “They can blow in quickly, so stay alert.”

Fortunately, the first set of dunes wasn’t as high as those of the previous day, and the sun wasn’t as strong.

After an hour of trekking they stopped at a water hole to wash their faces and refill their bottles. Cal was leaning back in the sand, looking up at the clouds, when he ripped out the earbuds of his iPod and shouted, “That fucking hurt!”

“What?”

Crocker saw that a yellow sand scorpion (
Opistophthalmus
) about two inches long had bitten the palm of his right hand. He washed the area with water and noted that the site of the sting was becoming red and swollen.

Even after he applied a local anesthetic, Cal continued to complain about the pain. He also reported a tingling, twitchy sensation up his right arm.

“It’s my trigger hand,” Cal said, grimacing. “Maybe it’s karma.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Payback for all the people I’ve killed.”

“I don’t know about that.”

Crocker knew that in some cases scorpion poisoning could cause shock and even death. He wished he had some tetanus toxoid with him, but he’d have to make do, because they wouldn’t reach the next medical aid and communications point until evening. So he wrapped his Buff headband around Cal’s right wrist to restrict the poison.

Meanwhile the sky had darkened and the wind had picked up. A cloud of fine red dust enveloped them. Huge balls of desert brambles raced across the sand.

“Where’d they come from?” Akil shouted.

“Seek cover, but stay away from the leeward side of the dunes. Keep your scarves secured over your nose, ears, and mouth. Make sure you keep your sunglasses on. Goggles, if you have them!” Crocker yelled back.

Within minutes visibility was zero. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. Each gust of wind carried with it a blast of highly abrasive sand that felt like it could rip the skin right off your body.

Crocker wrapped the thin Tyvek sheet he carried in his backpack around Cal and led him over to the water hole, where they knelt behind the stump of an old palm tree. It was hard to breathe.

Cal started to shiver. “How long is this likely to last?”

“Don’t think about that.”

After half an hour Crocker released the headband around Cal’s wrist, held his arm in the water for approximately five minutes, then secured the headband again, just tight enough to slow the flow of blood. He repeated the process a half hour later. Then the wind abated and the air started to clear. Within five minutes the sky overhead was blue and the sun was beating down strongly.

“Amazing,” Cal said.

“You feeling better?”

“My arm is killing me, and the rest of my body feels like shit.”

Five men were accounted for, but Akil was missing. They found him on the other side of a dune, wrapped in a blanket and covered with sand, and helped him dig out.

“You enjoy that, desert rat?”

“I think I dozed off.”

Or maybe he’d lost consciousness from sheer exhaustion. But as they walked he seemed to be his same happy-go-lucky self, talking about the movie
The Mummy
and one of his favorite actresses, Rachel Weisz. He was convinced that she’d fall for him if they ever met, and the others were too exhausted to tell him he was full of shit. Crocker helped Cal, who was slipping in and out of a fever. Hot one minute, freezing cold the next.

When they reached the night’s camp, the nurse there gave Cal a shot of tetanus toxoid, and he started to improve. His hand hurt, but his temperature and pulse returned to normal.

Akil’s mouth was still working, but his feet were beat to shit. And even though Mancini didn’t complain, he appeared to be favoring his left leg.

One more day,
Crocker said to himself as he poured hot water into a cupful of noodles. One of the Aussies shook a bucket of sand out of his long brown hair.

Someone tapped the SEAL chief on the shoulder. “Mr. Crocker?” the man asked. He was dressed head to toe in khaki and wore a bristling black mustache.

“Yeah.” Wondering if he was seeing a mirage.

“You’re Mr. Crocker?”

“That’s correct.”

The man bowed from the waist and handed Crocker a folded piece of paper. He read it quickly in the mottled light of the various lamps. At the end he saw the name Lou Donaldson, and he felt his sphincters tighten.

“Now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He wants us to withdraw from this race?”

“Affirmative, sir.”

“Does he realize that we’re half a day away from completing this sucker?”

“I believe he does, sir. Yes.”

Focusing on the typed instructions, he read them again carefully. Ritchie saw him reading and knelt beside him.

“What’s up, boss?”

Crocker folded the letter and handed it back to the waiting man. “Give us ten minutes to pack everything.”

“We’re leaving?”

“Seems like.”

The man in khaki pointed past a mud wall to a dirt road. “The vehicles are waiting over there, sir.”

“Ten-four.”

Ritchie again, at his elbow. “Boss, what is it? What’s he want?”

“We’re going to Rabat. We’ve got orders. Tell the others. Help them organize the gear.”

C
rocker, 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.