“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.”