Following twenty feet behind with Lasher and Akil, Crocker didn’t notice the indentation in the mountain until Jabril disappeared.
“Where’d you go?” he called.
“I’m over here,” the doctor shouted, his voice echoing through the mounds of sand.
When they joined him, he pointed to a pile of boulders positioned against the side of the mountain. “There’s an entrance somewhere behind there,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Unless the whole chamber was destroyed.”
It took almost an hour for Crocker, Davis, Akil, Ritchie, and Mancini to clear away the rocks. Behind them stood a metal door tall and wide enough to accommodate a truck and painted to blend in with the terrain.
“Clever, yes?” Jabril asked.
“Very clever,” Crocker answered. The hard work had made him sweat through his clothes.
“This must have cost a shitload to build,” Akil said.
“Hundreds of millions,” Lasher offered.
“What for?”
“To produce chemical weapons.”
“I know that already,” Akil answered. “My question is, What did Gaddafi want them for?”
“Back in the nineties, he had a vision of creating a united Africa. He called it the African Union and saw himself as its godfather. Planned to lead a united continent that would rival the United States or the Soviet Union in military and economic strength.”
“The man had ambition.”
“So did Hitler,” Mancini added.
The door had an internal lock that Mancini managed to pick-which was convenient, because the next option would have been to use explosives, and they didn’t know what was housed inside.
It took three men to push the door open. The awful screeching sound reverberated up Crocker’s spine. Hundreds of little black birds took flight and circled overhead.
Crocker, Lasher, Jabril, and Mancini were selected to wear the hazmat suits.
Unlike the Class C suits they had worn at Busetta that used gas masks to filter the outside air, these suits were Class A, which meant that they were vaporproof right down to their special seam-sealing zippers, two-ply chemical-resistant nitrile gloves, and supplied-air respirator with escape cylinder. Each man breathed from an oxygen tank strapped inside his suit.
The hiss of Crocker’s breath through the respirator and the crinkly roar produced by every movement of the thick plastic material drowned out all other sound. The suit was so bulky that Crocker couldn’t see his feet. And it was hot.
Holding a high-powered flashlight, Jabril led them inside one of two high tunnels that had been carved into the mountain. At one end was a twenty-by-twenty-foot chamber stacked to the ceiling with narrow five-foot-long aluminum cylinders.
“Mustard gas,” he said through the two-way radio built into his suit.
“Which ones?” Crocker asked.
The scientist pointed a purple glove to his right.
“And that’s sarin over here,” he said pointing to the cylinders to his left.
“That’s a whole lot of destructive power.”
“Serious stuff.”
“The sarin degrades quickly. But the mustard gas might still be lethal.”
“Even ten years later?”
“It’s possible.”
“I feel like I’m about to faint,” Lasher shouted through the radio. Mancini helped him out of the tunnel. The others followed.
Outside, Lasher removed his hood to reveal a head and face covered with sweat. After chugging a bottle of water, he said, “We’ve got to secure this place immediately. If the wrong people get their hands on this, the NTC could be fucked.”
“They’re fucked already,” Ritchie mumbled.
Davis: “The sat-phone’s in the vehicle.”
Lasher held up a hand. “Wait…”
Once he caught his breath, he explained that the United States had known about the chemical weapons stored here for years, but the Department of Defense had refused to allocate the $100 million it would cost to clean up the site and dispose of them.
“Why?” Ritchie asked.
“Politics. DOD wanted Congress to pass a special provision. The House held hearings back in 2007, but never allocated the funding.”
Akiclass="underline" “I hope someone’s willing to spend the money now.”
Ritchie: “Either that or we bury the whole fucking thing under the mountain. I can rig up a bomb with the extra can of gasoline attached to the back of the van.”
Crocker: “Not yet.”
When they’d rehydrated and cooled down as best they could, Crocker and Mancini accompanied Jabril for one last look around the tunnel. Sand gophers and lizards scurried about in the dark. When Mancini switched on the handheld digital Geiger counter, it went berserk, whining and flashing.
“Hey, boss!”
“Is it working correctly?”
Jabril said through the radio, “Let me see that machine.”
The device squealed even louder when he approached the chamber at the far end. In the cone of light Crocker saw a dozen green canisters-each one the width and half the length of a coffin-propped against the rear wall.
Jabril handed the flashlight and Geiger counter to Mancini and started to unfasten the metal clasps along the side of one of them.
“Is that safe?” Crocker asked.
“Probably not.”
The scientist pulled back the lid and pointed to where he wanted Mancini to shine the light. Embedded inside the canister were four dozen glass ampoules filled with white and silver crystals.
“What’s that?” Crocker asked.
“I believe it’s uranium hexafluoride,” Jabril said.
“UF6?”
“Yes.”
Crocker knew that UF6 was a compound needed to enrich uranium. It was hard to make and carefully monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
He tried to locate Mancini’s eyes through the plastic mask but it was completely fogged up.
“You okay in there?” Crocker asked.
“Yeah. You need UF6 to make a nuclear weapon,” Mancini shouted into his radio.
“I know. I know. Lower the fucking volume.”
“Sorry. What do we do now?”
Crocker said, “Let’s seal it back up and carry it out of here.”
“Why?”
“Just do it. I’ll explain outside.”
The two SEALs lugged the canister under their arms, set it down near the entrance, then went back to help Jabril, who seemed to be struggling. Once outside they helped him take off his hood and saw that the scientist’s face was deep red.
“It’s my heart.”
“Sit down, breathe deeply,” Crocker said, unbuttoning the top of the Libyan’s shirt and checking his pulse. “I’ll get you some water.”
Meanwhile, Mancini joined the other men, who were sitting in the shade, and explained what they had found. At the mention of uranium hexafluoride Lasher jumped to his feet. “Jesus Christ! You found UF6? You’re kidding. Where?”
“The ampoules are in the canister we carried out. Right there.”
Lasher ran over to it and examined the labels and writing on the outside.
Mancini warned, “It’s leaking radioactivity, so don’t get too close.”
Lasher said, “It was shipped to Tajoura in 2010. In 2010!”
Davis: “What’s Tajoura?”
“It’s a nuclear research facility about ten miles east of Tripoli. Houses a research lab and a ten-megawatt reactor built by the Soviets. But it was shut down in 2004, after Gaddafi told the world he was abandoning his plan to build a nuclear weapon. Back in March of that year the IAEA oversaw the removal of weapons-grade enriched uranium from Tajoura, which was then shipped to the Russian Federation.”
“Incredible,” Mancini muttered, shaking his head.
“Why is it here?” Crocker asked.
Lasher: “Good question.”
“What’s it mean?” Davis asked.
“It’s a smoking gun,” Lasher offered. “The proof that Scorpion is real-a lethal weapon buried in the desert sand.”
“A smoking gun in what sense?”
“The presence of UF6 proves that Gaddafi was still trying to build a nuclear weapon after the invasion of Iraq and the whole furor over WMDs. Back in 2004 he was afraid he was going to be invaded next. Made a speech before the UN, telling the whole world that he was going to play nice from now on.”