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.”