by Damien Lewis
“I’ve been told to call you and ask if you’re okay,” he said. “The British Embassy in Tripoli wants to know where you are and if you are all right.”
“I’m still in Benghazi,” I confirmed. “More importantly, any news of the Americans?”
“Nothing. Sorry. We have no one here now, as I think you know?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been told to tell you that if you need somewhere to lie low tonight you are welcome to come to the Residence.” I knew exactly where he meant: they had a villa about five minutes’ drive from the U.S. Mission. I now had a fallback option if my beachside villa got compromised. “I am here if you need to come.”
“Thanks,” I told him. “I’ll call you if I do.”
We were nearing the hospital. What I was dreading most was seeing the body of the dead American. I knew there might be Shariah Brigade here. I knew they’d told me if they saw me again tonight then I’d be killed. I was sick with worry, but not because of that. It was finding out who the dead American might be that was twisting my guts tight as a vise. What would I do if it was Dave, Scotty, or Sean? I just didn’t have the slightest idea . . .
I’d seen many friends dead. You do in this line of business. But this was different. With all the others I’d known who it was and exactly how they’d died. Mostly, they’d gone down fighting and with their brother warriors at their side. Right now, I had zero idea who was at the hospital, or how they might have been killed.
“Okay, Zahid, here’s the plan,” I announced. “We get there and see the bad guys, we don’t stop. If it’s all clear, we go in. Hamid, you stay with the vehicle, but keep your eyes peeled. You see any Shariah Brigade turn up, you call us. It’s a massive place and must have loads of fire exits. There’s no way the Shariah lot can lock them all off. We’ll find one that’s free and exit that way, then RV with you in the vehicle. Got it?”
Zahid and Hamid grunted their acknowledgments. We had a plan.
My adrenaline was pumping as we swung onto the dogleg access road that leads into the 1,200-Bed Hospital. I could see the three massive wings of the place lying before us arranged in an E-shape, the serried ranks of windows throwing off the muted glow of hospital wards semi-lit in the depths of night. The place looked almost peaceful, and I couldn’t believe for one moment that there were injured and dead Americans in there.
“What d’you reckon?” I asked Zahid. “Does it look okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, it looks okay. But stay close.”
Hamid pulled to a halt and Zahid and I got down from the vehicle. I reached behind me instinctively and tapped the butt of the Browning, just to be doubly sure it was safely tucked into my waistband. The bulk of the thing felt oddly reassuring and I had to remind myself it was only one pistol with thirty-plus rounds.
I glanced at Zahid. “Let’s go.”
As we headed for the main entrance this horrific screaming began. It sounded like someone was being operated on without an anesthetic, it was that bad. But I knew this place to be a reasonably modern, functioning hospital, so it couldn’t be that. It had to be wounded—though whether Shariah Brigade or Americans I couldn’t tell. People don’t tend to scream in any particular language.
“Here we bloody go!” I remarked to Zahid, as the screams became more and more intense and spine-chilling. “If it’s Shariah wounded they’ll have their people in here, that’s for sure.”
“No, no, it’s okay,” Zahid reassured me. “Just stay close.”
We entered, and Zahid stopped the first guy he saw wearing a white doctor’s coat. “Is there an American in here?” he asked, in Arabic. “We heard there were Americans?”
The doctor glanced from Zahid to me and back again. “Why? Why do you ask? Are you Americans?”
“British Embassy,” I cut in. He looked me up and down as if he didn’t believe a word. I fished in my pocket and flashed him the out-of-date Embassy ID card.
He looked it over briefly. “Okay. Please, follow me.”
He started walking, Zahid and I falling in behind him. I was trying to keep note of the twists and turns, as he hurried along a seemingly endless series of corridors. But each looked exactly the same as the last and all the signs were in Arabic, so I had no idea what wards we were passing. The place was a total maze.
“How many Americans?” Zahid asked, as he hurried to keep up with the doctor.
“Just the one.”
“We heard a white and a black guy?” Zahid probed.
The doctor shook his head. “No, no, just the one. A white. No black guy.”
The doctor looked harassed and I knew instinctively he was telling the truth—so either there was only one of the guys in here, or the doc didn’t know about a second one.
We rounded a right-hand corner, and Zahid’s phone rang.
“Tell them to fuck right off,” I snapped. “We’re busy.”
I was wound tight as a spring by what was almost upon us. I couldn’t handle any interruptions from worried family members, or any more wild rumors from across this benighted city.
Zahid shook his head. “No. I answer. It is Hamid.”
I watched his eyes grow wide with fear as he listened to Hamid’s hurried call. “The militia are here! Shariah Brigade!”
For a moment we locked eyes. I was convinced now we could check on the body and still get out of here. There were scores of fire exits that we’d passed, and no way could the Shariah Brigade have them all covered.
“Mr. Michael, we need to get out!” Zahid urged. “Now!”
“No way, Zahid. I’ve got to see the body.”
“But we have to leave. It was Hamid, phoning through the warning.”
I turned to the doctor. “Doc, how much farther?” I asked him, in Arabic.
He gestured ahead. “We are more or less here.”
I eyed Zahid. “Let’s keep going. We see it, we’re gone, okay?”
We hurried ahead, all three of us close to running now. We rounded a right-hand corner, and before us was a private-looking room with a long picture window looking out onto the corridor. The doctor gestured to the window. I stepped forward, dreading what I was going to see. I peered inside.
Lying on a trolley was a body. It was covered in a white sheet from the chest down, but the head and shoulders were bare and the face was turned toward the window. I froze. I felt as if I was going to vomit. I gripped the windowsill in an effort to stop myself from losing it. The face was horribly scorched and soot-blackened, but above that the gray hair was all too visible. I knew who it was instantly, but I simply could not believe what I was seeing.
I felt Zahid staring at me. “What’s wrong?”
I could feel my heart thumping irregularly, like the shock was going to fell me. I gripped the sill harder and forced myself to speak. “Zahid, get in there, and get a photo of the face with your cell phone.”
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t bring myself to go in. My mind was reeling. How on earth could this be possible? The repercussions of this were going to be incalculable.
The doctor started trying to interrogate me. “Who is it? You know him? The American—who is it? Give me a name!”
My mind was in utter turmoil. If I told the doc who it was, there was no way the hospital staff could protect his body, which had to mean it was better not to say. We still had Hamid screaming down the phone at us to get the hell out before the Shariah gunmen got to us. If they realized who this dead man was, they’d take his body as a trophy and parade it to the world—of that I was certain. Suddenly I knew what I had to do. But first we had to get out of this maze of a place, and without running into the Shariah mob, or their gunmen. Zahid emerged phone clasped in one hand.
“It is done,” he confirmed. He flashed me the ghostly picture. “Now, we go!”
I led the way to the nearest fire exit, retracing our steps to one that I’d memorized as we’d passed. Behind me I could hear Zahid asking what had happened to the American. How had he died?
&
nbsp; “He was brought in here unconscious,” the doctor explained. “He was unconscious upon arrival. We tried to resuscitate him for thirty minutes, but he had inhaled too much smoke. We could not reach him. Finally, we had to give up and accept that he was gone.”
I heard the doctor trying to get a name out of Zahid, but thankfully Zahid didn’t have a clue who the dead man was. The doctor hurried after and caught me. He started trying to pull me by the shoulder. He spoke pidgin English and he kept on and on with the same questions.
“You—you know who it is! Tell me! You know who it is! Tell me the American’s name!”
“Look, I’m the British Embassy guy. He’s American. I don’t have a sodding clue.”
We reached the fire exit and I booted it open. An alarm started blaring. I drew the Browning and slipped outside, hugging the shelter of the wall. Zahid was right behind me. I scanned the terrain immediately to our front, but there was nothing: no Shariah gun trucks for as far as I could see. We’d emerged at the rear of the hospital, and it looked as if there was no vehicular access around this side.
I sheathed the weapon, flopped my shirt back over it, and eyed Zahid. “Let’s go,” I rasped. “Call Hamid. Tell him to RV with us over there.”
We turned right, heading for the very end and turning point of the hospital access road. We climbed some banking, jumping over a low-lying hedge that barred the way, and made our way onto the tarmac.
Not two hundred yards to our front I could see the enemy now. There were half a dozen Shariah Brigade gun trucks clustered around the main entrance to the hospital. I saw figures hurrying inside, carrying the bloodied forms of their injured. It struck me as being the ultimate sick irony: the Shariah mob were bringing their injured to be treated at the same place where the American that I’d just seen had been brought—and he was their chief target.
If Zahid and I ran into that group we were finished. After what the Americans had clearly done to their number—shot them all to hell—they wouldn’t be very happy coming face-to-face with me. That, I figured, would be game over.
Not a moment too soon Hamid pulled up beside us and we dived into the vehicle. He moved away, driving carefully so as not to arouse suspicion. I sank lower in the seat so as to hide my presence. A few moments later we were out of the Shariah Brigade’s sight and their line of fire. I sat back in the seat shocked into total silence. I still could not believe what I had just seen.
I glanced at my watch: it was just after 2:00 A.M. Libya time, 8:00 P.M. in Washington D.C.
The dead man was J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya.
Ambassador Stevens was a man who had spoken fluent Arabic and who loved this part of the world and its people. He was a man who had done so much to bring the U.S. administration over to support the Libyan rebels, as they had battled Gaddafi loyalist forces. And this was the thanks he had got—to be burned to death and left in some shitty Libyan hospital, alongside those who had killed him.
I had never felt so angry or enraged in my life.
I was burning up inside.
I didn’t know what to do. It was the worst moment of my entire life. I was beyond reason. I did the only thing I could think of: I pulled out my phone and called Robert. He was my boss, but more important, he was a father figure and a man of unrivaled experience. Plus I knew we could converse in Welsh, so that if anyone was listening in they wouldn’t have a clue what we were on about.
“Listen, it is one hundred percent confirmed that Ambassador Stevens is dead,” I blurted out, just as soon as he’d answered. “The U.S. ambassador has been killed.”
It took a lot to shock a man such as him, but all there was now was a ringing silence on the other end of the line. “Are you absolutely fucking certain?” he asked, eventually. He seemed unable or unwilling to believe it.
“One hundred percent certain.” I told him we had the photo to prove it, and that I’d send it on from Zahid’s phone.
Silence again. Then: “What about all the other Americans?”
“I figure they’ve all got to be dead. I can’t get hold of anyone. The main man is dead. Surely, that must mean all of them are dead. They’d have fought to protect him to the last man . . .”
“Right, you’ve got to make a run for it,” Robert told me. “If you don’t hear anything either way within thirty minutes get the hell out. Stay in the villa in the meantime, stay calm, but be ready to run. Let’s see how things unfold in the next thirty mins, okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
Robert presumed I was still in the villa. I’d chosen not to tell him that I was in a car with two of my guards driving away from the hospital.
And I didn’t tell him that lying low was the last thing I had in mind.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I got off the phone to Robert, then sent a text message to every American I could think of—a bunch of RSOs, special operations forces guys, and other assorted operators—alerting them to the shattering news: Confirmed: your No. 1 guy is in the 1200-bed Hospital, dead. Priority get your people there now to retrieve him.
I didn’t get a single response, but I had to hope the message was getting through and that they’d get a team to the hospital to retrieve the Ambassador’s body. He’d had a tiny cut on his forehead, but otherwise he’d appeared unharmed. He didn’t look as if he’d been beaten or manhandled, so how the hell had he died, and from smoke inhalation of all things? His death just didn’t make the slightest bit of sense, as so many other things didn’t on this crazed and messed-up night.
I had a million questions searing through my mind. How on earth had the Ambassador ended up there and alone? Where was his close protection team? Had they died with him? Where were Dave, Scotty, and Sean? I knew that not a man among them would have let the Ambassador be taken while they still had fight in them, so presumably all were dead. Where were the guys from the Annex? With their number-one guy abandoned in a Benghazi hospital I had to presume they had all been killed, but surely that was impossible . . .
As thought after thought fired through my head I knew that I was close to cracking up. In desperation I tried phoning Dave and Scotty again. The last communication I’d had with them was the call with Dave on the roof of the VIP Villa: There’re too many. We ain’t gonna make it, buddy. There was no answer. I would have given anything—anything—to hear his voice; any voice. But nothing. I tried all the RSOs’ numbers, then Sean’s—but still not a thing.
Then a thought struck me like a punch to the gut: If all the Americans are dead, am I the last good guy left in this fucked-up city? I had to presume that I was. If so, where were the American reinforcements? Where were the teams of Special Forces flying in to the rescue? If the city was littered with American dead, they needed teams in here fast to extract the bodies. But I couldn’t raise a soul, and their top guy was lying dead and apparently forgotten in a downtown Benghazi hospital.
I had this one thought running around and around in my head now: If the Ambassador is dead then all must be dead . . . If the Ambassador is dead then all must be dead . . . It kept going around and around and around. I tried to think of scenarios whereby the Ambassador could end up killed but those around him survived. Maybe he’d tried to make a run for it and been captured? But his CP guys were bound to have locked him into the safe room in the VIP Villa—a kind of fortress within the heart of the villa itself—so how did that make any sense?
The safe room was more like a prison cell, or at least a set of steel bars that separated off a section of the villa. The Ambassador would have been shut away in there so the bad guys couldn’t get to him, while the RSOs were up on the roof fighting them off. But even with him confined to the safe room, his CP guys should have stayed with him absolutely glued to his side. But maybe they’d been driven out by the smoke and lost the Ambassador in all the confusion? I just didn’t know.
I’d done some training in smoke-filled environments: they are utterly horrendous and terrifying. I’d had an oxygen mask o
n my face as they’d pumped the smoke into the room until it was so thick I couldn’t see the hand in front of my face. Even when breathing pure oxygen and with no risk of smoke inhalation I’d still found it horrific. By contrast, these guys would have been in a room filled with thick, choking smoke, unable to see or to breathe properly and with rounds flying everywhere, and the bad guys desperate to kill them.
It was the ultimate nightmare scenario.
The only way to stand any chance of survival in a smoke-filled room is to get down on the floor, where there might still be some oxygen, as smoke rises. But if you left someone in a smoke-filled room for three minutes, you could more or less guarantee they would not survive. Zahid had given me those eyewitness reports about the villas being on fire, and I could only assume that was how the Ambassador had died, plus presumably all the others who had been with him.
What an unspeakable way to go.
I was torn away from my dark, murderous thoughts by Zahid. He’d just taken another call.
“There is a massive firefight at the far side of the Embassy compound,” he explained, “maybe a kilometer away, at some other building.”
The Annex. It had to be. So at least it seemed there were some Americans somewhere still fighting. According to Zahid’s news the Shariah Brigade had launched a further massive assault. It was mind-boggling. Their intelligence must have been so good they knew where that supposedly top-secret base was situated—something that even I hadn’t known—and to hit both locations.
They’d launched a two-pronged assault employing hundreds of fighters and in total secrecy. My intel network was tight in Benghazi—yet neither Massoud nor any of my guards had picked up even a hint of the coming attack, and neither had the Americans. The ramifications of this were deadly serious. If the Annex was under attack, the Shariah Brigade would have hit it to prevent any QRF getting to the aid of those at the Embassy. As if this night weren’t dark enough, it had just become one hell of a lot darker.