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.
Akiclass="underline" “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.
Akiclass="underline" “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.”
Chapter Nine
Act like a man of thought. Think like a man of action.
– Thomas Mann
The sky was pitch black by the time the NATO helicopter landed at the airport in Sirte, which was some 280 miles southeast of Tripoli. The town of seventy-five thousand was the birthplace of Muammar Gaddafi and the place where he had been captured and killed on October 20 of the preceding year. The airport and terminal still showed signs of the recent fighting: damaged and pockmarked buildings, the rusting carcass of a tank with slogans painted on it in white, pickup trucks with mounted antiaircraft guns and.50-caliber guns in back, their barrels pointed at the sky but covered with tarps.