Sahara

by Russell Blake

  “I figured you might.”

  Chapter 6

  Tripoli, Libya

  Moonlight silvered the surface of the water inside the harbor breakwater, where dozens of cargo ships lay at anchor, their running lights blinking through a creeping mist. A foghorn from the port soughed through the stillness of the night, blending with the occasional clank of anchor chain and the boom of watertight doors slamming aboard the vessels.

  Waves crashed against the breakwater from the remnants of a Mediterranean storm, sending plumes of white foam high into the dark sky. The battering had been constant over the centuries, and the heavy boulders were worn smooth from nature’s incessant polishing. The putter of an occasional fishing skiff making its way to the mouth of the harbor carried across the water, joining the roar of trucks and cars from onshore to create an uneasy dissonance.

  A flat-bottomed native craft with a wheezing outboard motor plied its way along the water to where the hulking forms of what remained of the Libyan navy were docked at four jetties, the ships barely afloat, with one so badly corroded from lack of maintenance that it had capsized and lay half submerged on its side. The little boat slowed as it neared the docks, and the pilot cut the engine as it approached the closest pier, allowing momentum to carry it the rest of the way. A deckhand on the bow tossed a line around a piling and pulled the small craft to the side of the dock, where another man on the stern lashed a rope to a rusting cleat and tied the hull close to the weathered surface.

  A guard walked toward the new arrival, his machine gun leveled at the boat. The captain exchanged a few words with the man and handed him a wad of currency, and he retreated into the shadows without a sound.

  When the deckhands were sure that they were no longer being observed, the captain whispered instructions, and one of the crew climbed onto the pier carrying a bundle in a burlap sack. He glanced around and then took off at a run toward the main building that housed the unity government’s naval force, along with a collection of deniable “advisors” from the U.S. and several other NATO member countries, who had been stationed there following the fall of Qaddafi.

  The deckhand approached the building, set the bundle down in front of one of the three entrances, and activated a timer. When the LED display blinked red three times, he turned and retraced his steps to the boat, sprinting the final thirty meters, sandals flapping like the broken wings of an injured bird. He leapt aboard the skiff and the others cast off, and then the motor revved and the craft skimmed away from the base before disappearing into the night.

  The bundle at the door exploded three minutes later with a muffled boom. Lights blinked on in the barracks as the two thousand men stationed inside jolted awake, prepared for an attack by any of the competing forces who constantly vied for control over the port city. Within moments armed figures began pouring from the entrance, the door of which had been blown off its hinges by the bomb, and more took up defensive positions at the windows, their rifles trained on the darkness beyond the reach of the building’s lights.

  More gunmen spilled from the barracks, but the first dropped their rifles and clawed at their throats before collapsing, racked by seizures. Bloody froth foamed from their mouths and noses, and they gasped and wheezed as their respiratory systems shut down. By the time the men realized that they’d been subjected to a chemical attack, over a hundred were down, and their commanding officers were screaming instructions from inside the building, where still more were dropping to the floor, the nerve agent having dispersed inside as well as out by the blast.

  An hour later, a third of the men who’d been in the building were dead or dying, and the rest had taken up positions well away from the blast site. The spectacle of their comrades twisted in tortured agony, rigor mortis stiffening their limbs, was seared into their brains as crews in hazmat suits arrived from the nearby military garrison. Emergency vehicles clogged the streets leading to the naval base, and roadblocks were hastily erected for crowd control as the curious arrived like vultures to rotting carrion.

  Across the harbor, the skiff tied off to a dock by the old city, and the captain killed the engine and led his men across the former Shari Al Fatih Boulevard – renamed Tripoli Street, at least in common usage, after the revolution – to one of the mosques that dotted the area. Inside, they sat with a stoic man who spoke in a hoarse whisper.

  “The first reports are promising. The blow was a mighty one. Hundreds of casualties and the forces in complete disarray. It will be just a matter of time before their farce of a government is brought to its knees, and then we can install proper leadership that will honor the Prophet’s teachings. No longer will foreigners dictate our future.” He paused and lowered his voice even further. “This is only the beginning. You have done well. Very soon we will be ready for the next phase.”

  “We are honored to be a part of the fight,” the captain said.

  “We will all be tested in the coming days, but I have faith that you will perform. This was only the first salvo. I will call upon you for even greater responsibility in the near future. For now, go to your homes and pray. Thank Allah for your success, and kiss your children. It is their future we are building.”

  “Thank you. We are nothing but insects in the scheme of things.”

  “We all play our roles. Now go and rest, because soon you will embark on the next leg of this journey, and when you do, you’ll require all the energy you can muster.”

  Chapter 7

  Al Ghurayfah, Libya

  Mounir sat in his living area staring despondently at his wife’s suicide note and the niqab that a local urchin had found in the mountains to the south. With him were his two closest confidants, Brahim and Mohamed, who had come to grieve with their friend and master when they’d heard the news of the tragedy.

  “I can’t believe it,” Mounir muttered. “She gave no indication. I mean, she’d been depressed over not being able to bear children, but she didn’t…she didn’t seem unhappy in any other way.”

  “The mind of a woman is a mystery,” Brahim intoned, nodding sagely.

  “Indeed it is. You gave her a good life,” Mohamed agreed. “There is nothing for which you should blame yourself.”

  “I know,” Mounir said. “It’s just…I can’t believe it. It came out of nowhere.”

  “She’s probably been considering it for a long time.”

  “Or maybe she had a hormone imbalance,” Mohamed suggested. “You know how women can get.”

  Mounir shook his head. “That this happens right when Tariq has escaped and our plan is finally being put into action…I don’t know. It feels…off.”

  “Any time someone is taken from us suddenly, it is a shock. That’s to be expected,” Brahim said.

  Mounir frowned at him. “Since when are you such an expert on women and loss?”

  Brahim’s expression didn’t change. “I know little of most things, but of loss, too much.”

  Mounir sat in silence, rocking slightly, lost in thought. His friends exchanged a worried look, but didn’t speak. He was obviously having a difficult time processing the death of his wife, and given the volatility of his personality, it was safest not to irritate him with more platitudes. They could sense the anger seething below the surface, and didn’t want to serve as targets if he exploded in rage.

  Mounir finally sat forward, and when he spoke, his voice held no trace of grief. “The boy who brought us her headdress – I want you to find him and ask where exactly he found it. Have him take you to the spot. He’s called Jamal, and his family’s home is by the mosque square. They repair shoes.”

  “Now?” Mohamed asked, glancing at the wall clock.

  “Yes.”

  “It will be dark in a few hours, Mounir.”

  “Then take lanterns and flashlights. Nobody’s seen a body. So we can’t be sure that she’s actually dead.”

  Brahim’s eyes widened in comprehension. “You think she faked this? Why?”

  “I don’t know. But she decid
ed to end her life on the day that I received the specifics of the plan, and that makes me suspicious. Almost immediately after, in fact. The timing is too close for me to assume anything. I have to know for sure.”

  “You suspect Salma of…betraying us? Why?”

  “I…I don’t know what to think. She never seemed happy. Not genuinely so. I remember when we met, I wondered how I had gotten so lucky – she was so beautiful. Perhaps…perhaps she never loved me at all. Perhaps this has always been about something…else.”

  Brahim frowned. “You’ve been married for what, three years? That is a long time, my friend. I mean, anything is possible; yours was not an arranged marriage. Why would she have married you if not because she wanted to?”

  “I have always been a target of our enemies, even if I have been a relatively inconsequential player until now. My duty is not to guess; it is to know. So go. Find this boy Jamal. Have him take you to the ravine, and don’t return until you’ve found Salma’s remains.”

  “That terrain is treacherous during the day. Dangerously so at night.”

  Mounir’s eyes narrowed and his face flushed. “It is not a request. If we have been betrayed, time is of the essence. Now go.”

  Mohamed and Brahim did as asked, and on the dusty trek to the square, spoke in low tones. “He’s seeing ghosts. He hasn’t slept in two days. He isn’t making sense,” Brahim said.

  “Yes, but his words are to be obeyed. Do we have a choice?”

  “No. But we’ll be up all night ourselves.” He sighed. “We can stop by my house to get lamps. We’ll need them.”

  “After we find the boy.”

  Jamal was playing with two other children the same age in the shade of his parents’ shop. Brahim and Mohamed introduced themselves to his father and told them of Mounir’s request. Mounir was well known in the town and considered a serious man of deep faith, and the father approved Jamal taking them to the spot where he’d found the scrap of clothing.

  “Just be home before dark,” he warned his son, who was small for his seven years.

  “I will, Papa,” Jamal assured him, and set off with the men on foot. After stopping for lanterns, they continued through the town to a trail that the local boys used to access the hills when hunting rabbits and birds.

  The ascent took over an hour, and by the time Jamal had stopped to point out a scraggly tree by the edge of a gulley, the light was bleeding from the sky. “It was there. I was hunting, hoping to get a bird, and it was moving with the wind.”

  “How did you know it was Salma’s?” Brahim asked.

  “I didn’t. It was only after I got back to town that I heard the news of her death. So I brought it to him. That’s all I know.”

  “There was nothing else?” Mohamed asked.

  Jamal’s brow creased. “Like…what?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. Any trace of where she’d…fallen?”

  Jamal shook his head. “I didn’t look. Like I said, I didn’t know about…that she’d…died…until after I came back.” He hesitated and regarded the men. “I promised my father I’d come home before dark.”

  “Of course,” Mohamed said. “You can go. Thank you for leading us here, and be careful going back down the trail.”

  Jamal left, and Brahim eyed the steep face of the ravine. “So where do we start?”

  Mohamed sighed. “At the beginning, I suppose. Let’s see if we can spot where she threw herself off.”

  Brahim stared up at the darkening sky. “You see that?”

  “No. What?”

  “Exactly. No vultures. You’d think if there was a body down here, there would be buzzards, even a day or two later, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Inconclusive,” Mohamed said, but his voice betrayed his doubt.

  “Come on. You take the right side, I’ll take the left. If we’re lucky, she left some tracks.”

  Forty-five minutes later, the sun was dropping behind the hills, and they hadn’t found anything. After studying the ridge for hundreds of meters in each direction, they could spot no sign of a body below or any indication of where someone had jumped. Yet while the rock face was steep, it wasn’t sheer, and unless Salma could fly, she would have struck the craggy cliff.

  Brahim switched on his lamp and Mohamed did the same, and they continued along the ridge until they came across a trail that led down to the bottom. “Might as well go down and check the bed. Not a lot of places she could be.”

  “Maybe Mounir’s not so paranoid after all?”

  “No point jumping to conclusions.”

  Mohamed grinned. “Funny choice of words.”

  The men picked their way down the side of the ravine to the dry, gravelly bottom and worked back toward where Jamal had found the headdress. The moon was high in the sky by the time they had hiked a kilometer without coming across anything, and when they stopped to rest, both men’s expressions were dour.

  “I think we can say with assurance that there’s no body down here,” Mohamed said.

  “And no sign of one on the way down, either.”

  “So where is she?”

  Brahim sighed. “We’re assuming that Mounir is right and that she did all this because of Tariq. But what if she just got tired of putting up with Mounir every day and decided to make a break for it? What if this is all coincidence?”

  “That she just happened to leave at the exact moment he got the final details of the plan?” Mohamed asked, and spit to the side. “I understand what you’re saying, but if she didn’t kill herself, I think we have to assume Mounir is right. In which case, we have a huge problem.”

  After two more hours of searching, they had traversed the entire ravine and were so cold their teeth were chattering as the high desert temperature dropped toward freezing. They climbed another trail to the top, breathing heavily from the exertion, their lanterns dimming as the batteries ran down. By the time they made it back to Mounir’s, they were exhausted, coated with a film of trail dust, and grimly determined.

  Mounir greeted them at the door, his expression matching theirs.

  “You didn’t find her, did you?” he demanded.

  “No.”

  Mounir checked the dirt street outside and stepped from the door. “Come in.”

  When they were seated on his rug pile, he glared at them, his eyes bright with fury. “I went through everything on the computer. One of the logs shows that the contents of the USB drive with the plans on it were copied the night Salma disappeared. So it’s worse than I suspected. She was spying on us and waiting for her chance to betray us.”

  “Then we have to assume that she’s sent it to whomever she’s working for.”

  “Maybe. But how? There’s no internet or wireless service. Only cell. And the reception is too weak for data – it’s been a constant problem since they installed the towers. So, no, that’s probably why she broke and ran. She needed to get somewhere she could relay the information. Which means she has to be heading for Tripoli. There’s no other way.”

  “A single woman on the road north? The problem may take care of itself,” Brahim said.

  “Perhaps. But I want to mobilize our network. Find her. She can’t have gotten far on foot. She probably assumes we believe she’s dead, so she’ll be cautious, which means moving slower.” Mounir frowned, and his face turned ugly. “Find her and bring her to me. There’s a special circle in hell reserved for traitors and spies, but before I send her there, I plan to demonstrate that this world holds something worse. Find her. Whatever you have to do. She knows everything, and she must be stopped.”

  Chapter 8

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  Jet sat in a SUV with windows tinted so dark they were nearly opaque, reading the case file on Salma’s undercover work as the wife of a known Libyan terrorist who was believed to be responsible for a host of atrocities both in-country as well as throughout the Middle East – and a known associate of Tariq, one of the most vicious and intelligent masterminds of the Wahhabi s
ects that had found a foothold in Europe since the Libyan and Syrian crises had flooded Spain, Italy, France, and Germany with refugees, some of whom were zealots of the most extreme sort.

  She studied a prison photograph of Tariq, his cruel features and smoldering eyes typical of the extremist breed. Jet was more than familiar with the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, which was the most violent and brutal of the many possible, and which encouraged Jihad against nonbelievers – including, of course, Israel. An export of radical clerics in Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism was at the root of all Muslim terrorism worldwide, exported by the Saudis in an effort to prevent the metastasizing of the ideology at home. They had been largely successful, but at tremendous cost to the rest of the world – a fact that governments dependent upon Saudi oil and the wealth it had created conveniently overlooked.

  Salma had married Mounir, one of Tariq’s most loyal disciples, and had remained in deep cover for years. She occasionally managed to relay information to the Mossad about Libyan internal political squabbles and the increasingly large role the country was playing in recruiting for the most noxious of the terrorist organizations, though nothing specific to Tariq – Libya was now a magnet for those who viewed the West as a destructive force of evil that destabilized and destroyed the lives of millions in an ongoing game of geopolitical chess. Since the overthrow of Qaddafi, the entire country was a war zone, its infrastructure in ruins, its prosperity looted by criminal factions acting as quasi-governments, its population terrorized.

  This was the environment Salma had chosen to live in, sleeping with a man she despised so that she could do her duty to the organization that had recruited and trained her for great things. Jet felt a pang of pain in her gut at the familiar story, which mirrored hers in too many ways – Salma had sacrificed the best years of her life to live in constant danger for an unclear objective, while Jet had done the same, becoming a ruthless killing machine sent as an instrument of destruction whenever her country decided that a situation could be best handled with only the most violent of means.