Jet tried to imagine spending over a thousand days married to a pig of a man whose touch nauseated her and whose beliefs were Neanderthal, and she shuddered as she perused the status report on conditions on the ground in Libya as of the prior week. While life had assumed a kind of tense normalcy in the capital city, the murder rate was still one of the highest on the planet, and the belief was that it was in actuality far higher, with the majority of cases going unreported as rival gangs exterminated anyone who opposed them, and the authorities remained ensconced behind thick, fortified walls. But bad as that was, the situation further degraded once out of Tripoli. South of the city there was no pretense of law or governance, and it was one armed faction against the other, making their own rules as they went, safe in the assurance that the world had abandoned Libya to an awful fate, as had been the history of all of Africa since the Europeans colonized it and spent centuries harvesting its resources, leaving the populations to existences of misery and horror.
Jet considered again her agreement to go in for Salma, which had seemed necessary and appropriate the night before, but now, with dawn still hours away, appeared rash and thoughtless. She was again leaving the safety of Matt’s embrace and her beautiful daughter to put herself in harm’s way in one of the most dangerous hellholes on earth.
She finished her first pass and slid the folder into the black backpack that was her only luggage. A private jet, its lights winking in the darkness, sat on the runway just past the gate. The sound of its turbines spooling up was practically deafening as she opened the door and stepped from the SUV, clad in a dark blue long-sleeved robe and colorful hijab, the better to fit in with the locals in Tripoli. Beneath the traditional garb she wore her usual cargo pants and ops shirt, their special material cool but stunningly durable, their multiple pockets and compartments making them perfect for any situation other than a cocktail party or royal wedding.
A hard-looking man with a crew cut opened the gate for her and she walked to the plane. A pilot waited at the top of the steps and offered a professional smile before wordlessly moving to the cockpit to join his copilot, leaving the battening down of the fuselage to a woman about Jet’s age, who seemed equally uninterested in anything about her, and who also spoke not a word to her as the aircraft prepared for takeoff.
The plane taxied to the end of the runway and then shot forward as though fired from a gun, and after several moments of bone-crushing acceleration, soared into the sky, its wings leaving streaks of white in their wake. Jet retrieved the file from her backpack and read it again, ensuring that she was familiar with every aspect of it by the time she landed.
The trip would take two and a half hours, and after she was done with the file, she slid it into a burn bag that had been thoughtfully left on the seat beside her for her use, and reclined the seat. The hostess approached and offered her juice and her choice of breakfasts, which she declined, her stomach tense and the thought of a prepackaged meal unappealing. She spent the rest of the flight with her eyes closed, snatching what sleep she could before her adventure began in earnest.
Jet was awakened by the pilot, whose face bore a worried expression.
“There’s a problem,” he said. “Tripoli airport is closed down.”
“Closed? Why?”
“Security problems. Some sort of terrorism alert. Not many details, but they’re diverting all commercial arrivals.”
Jet thought for a moment. “Commercial. What about private?”
“There won’t be any ground crew or immigration officials.”
“Never much cared for them anyway. Can you get me on the ground? I can take it from there.”
“We can probably land, but it’s questionable whether you’ll be able to clear customs.”
“Don’t worry about that. Have you filed a manifest with the airport?”
“Nobody’s asked for one yet.”
“I’m not here.”
The pilot considered the situation for a moment. “It’ll be light out soon after we touch down.”
“I’ll only need a few minutes. Do you have enough fuel to turn around quickly?”
“Of course. No way we’d fly into Libya without enough to get home.”
The pilot returned to his station and the plane began a gradual descent, banking over the Mediterranean as it approached the airport. When the jet’s wheels hit the tarmac, it almost immediately began to decelerate, and Jet was pushed forward against her seatbelt as the little plane slowed.
The sky was painted lavender and tangerine by the rising sun as the plane rolled along the runway, and Jet could see the wreckage of damaged jets destroyed during the battle of Tripoli Airport still sitting where they’d been bombed, there being nobody equipped or motivated to move them. A few commercial airliners were parked at the main terminal, whose lights were burning bright in the predawn, and Jet pushed herself to her feet and moved to the cockpit door to instruct the pilots on where to go.
She swung it open and eyed the surroundings through the small windshield. “There are some private jets over at the far end. Get ready to swing the fuselage door open, and I’ll jump out. Then turn around and take off. You can tell air traffic control that you didn’t realize the strip was closed, and apologize for the mistake. Not like they can do much about it once you’re in the air.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” the pilot said.
“Me too.”
The jet slowed near what passed for the private aviation terminal, and the hostess released the door, and the stairs swung toward the ground. The pilot came to a full stop, and Jet dropped to the tarmac; and then the plane was in motion again as the steps retracted and the aircraft swung around in a wide circle to return to the runway. She glanced around and then ran toward the other jets in a crouch, grateful for the remaining darkness but aware that she’d be fully exposed within a matter of minutes.
Truck headlights materialized from the opposite end of the airport and approached the private terminal as Jet’s plane began its takeoff run with a roar. She continued toward the darkened building and ducked along the side as the truck arrived. It did a slow patrol of the private aircraft area, engine barely idling, a single orange roof emergency light strobing the planes. Jet flattened herself against the wall as the lights swept past the building, and then she was moving again, running along a strip of pavement that led to the passenger terminal, her robe flapping around her, the drone of the truck engine behind her goading her forward.
A voice called out from the darkness ahead of her in Arabic. “You. Stop!”
Jet cursed under her breath and slowed. A uniformed guard brandishing an assault rifle stepped from the shadows. “What are you doing here? Running like that?”
“I got lost. I walked here from the main road, but I’m all turned around. I don’t want to miss my flight.”
“All the flights have been canceled today.”
“What? How am I supposed to get home?”
“Not my problem. The airlines can handle that. The passenger terminal is the big building.”
“It sounds like I don’t have to rush now.”
The man looked her up and down. “Where were you flying to?”
Jet didn’t hesitate. “Egypt. Cairo.”
The guard shook his head. “Well, good luck. And don’t run. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”
Jet dipped her head passively and averted her eyes so she wouldn’t seem too aggressive or otherwise memorable. “Thank you. I was so afraid I would miss my flight.”
The guard grunted and returned to his station, and Jet resumed her trek to the terminal, now walking at a normal pace, an anonymous woman caught in an aviation purgatory in a city under siege.
Chapter 9
Jet approached the terminal and found herself in a throng of travelers and scattered groups there to welcome new arrivals, all agitated by the news that flights had been canceled until further notice and everyone was effectively stranded. A host of voices echoed from the
crowd, and Jet easily made out Italian, English, and German in addition to the pervasive Arabic.
She was to meet a Mossad head of station named Leo inside the terminal, and would know him by his red windbreaker if she didn’t recognize him from the photograph in her briefing file. When she shouldered through the oversized doors, it was pandemonium, the high ceilings amplifying the worried and outraged voices of passengers who were being told by airline personnel that they were stuck in Tripoli until flights resumed. Clumps of business travelers stood in confused huddles, trying to make sense of conflicting instructions and announcements by personnel who were clearly being tasked with dealing with a situation far above their pay grade.
Jet felt a pang of empathy for an airline employee in a rumpled uniform at one of the counters, who was trying to maintain a dispassionate tone as she patiently explained for probably the hundredth time that the aviation authority had temporarily shut down traffic to the airport, both arriving and departing, and that she expected to have more information shortly but couldn’t do anything other than wait along with the travelers. A pair of tall Germans were peppering her with questions in accented English, their Teutonic annoyance manifesting as cynical invective and demands for answers she obviously couldn’t provide.
Jet looked around the hundreds of people in the building, searching for the telltale red windbreaker, which would have probably been a fine differentiator under normal circumstances, but was inadequate in a packed terminal filled with every color vestment in the rainbow. She wished the director had thought to equip her with a cell phone, but the plan had been for Leo to provide any necessary gear, in order to keep questions to a minimum when she passed through customs and immigration.
She spotted the back of a red jacket on a dark-haired man who could have been Leo, and pushed through a sea of passengers, only to reach him and see that he looked nothing like the photograph. Jet continued past him, eyes roaming over the mob, and saw another red top twenty meters away by one of the entryways. She edged past a line of local car hire agents pitching stranded passengers on their wares, and made her way toward the man, who was turned away from her, watching the scene outside through the heavy glass doors.
He stiffened as she neared, and she saw that he’d spotted her in the reflection and so was unsurprised when she put her hand on his shoulder. He turned with a fatigued smile, and crow’s feet crinkled in the corners of his eyes.
“Omar! It’s been too long,” Jet said, using the introductory phrase from the file.
“The years have been kinder to you than to me,” he replied, finishing the sequence. He briefly surveyed the chaos surrounding them and cocked his head at the door. “Come on. I have a car.”
Leo led her outside and guided her through the loiterers to a parking lot only a third full of vehicles, most of which appeared to be ready for the junkyard. Soldiers ringed the lot with Kalashnikovs, and as the sun broke over the horizon and warmed her skin, a sense of impending danger was palpable.
They stopped in front of a rusting Renault sedan that was at least forty years old, and she eyed it dubiously.
“So what happened?” she asked.
“Terrorist attack on the naval base. Some kind of nerve agent. That’s all I know. Nobody’s claimed responsibility, and any of a dozen groups could be behind it. But what makes this worse than the usual mayhem is the bioweapon. Usually we see bombs. This is way different. Hundreds dead, although the reports have been shut down by the government.” He paused. “That number comes from one of my sources.”
He unlocked the door for her and she shrugged off the straps of her backpack and climbed into the car. He rounded the fender and slid behind the wheel, and the engine cranked over with a reluctant shudder before settling into an uneasy idle that sounded like monkeys banging on a pan with hammers.
“This thing will actually get us where we need to go?” Jet asked.
“Hope so. It’s one of the better rides in town.”
He slammed the shifter into gear and they rolled off in a cloud of blue exhaust, past a trio of soldiers by the entrance, who stared at them impassively. Once on the road, Leo filled her in on the current situation, where you didn’t travel anywhere in town by night, and there were armed militias controlling whole swaths of the outer city, where the districts were outside of government control.
“Which isn’t saying much,” he continued. “What passes for a government here would make a Moroccan carpet merchant blush. You’ve never seen levels of corruption like this, and there’s no end to it. Whenever one group gets tossed out, the new one is even worse.” He cleared his throat. “But that’s not your problem. We got a coded communication from Salma a few hours ago. She’ll be in Sebha by this evening.”
“Sebha? That’s in the middle of the desert, isn’t it?”
Leo nodded. “A ten-hour drive, assuming you aren’t stopped by one of the militias.”
“How are we supposed to extract her from there?”
“She’ll rendezvous with you tomorrow. You’ll recognize her by a headscarf she’ll be wearing. You’ll be dressed as a Berber woman, unless you prefer what you’ve got on.”
“Why Berber?”
“Less chance of being assaulted. The Berber tribes are more feared the deeper into the desert you go.”
Jet frowned. “What’s the situation in Sebha like?”
“Imagine as bad as you can get, and it’s worse. There are active slave markets, and half the population is armed at all times. There’s no rule of law, and there are three different warlords who squabble over territory, massacring anyone unlucky enough to be in the line of fire when they’re fighting it out.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Not a pleasant place. You won’t want to spend too much time there.”
“How am I supposed to get all the way to Sebha if the roads are death traps? I’m guessing you’ve thought that through?”
“Absolutely. We got you wheels.”
“Wheels,” she repeated. “To travel…over six hundred kilometers of war zone?”
“Headquarters indicated you were the best. They had high confidence you could get to Sebha and help with the extraction.”
“For which there’s a plan, I presume?”
“They’re working on it. Depends on what you encounter. There’s an airport there, although it’s not in use. But they might be able to get a helicopter in, depending on how locked down airspace is over the next few days.”
“A helicopter from where?”
He kept his eyes on the road. “To be determined. Might also be able to get a light jet in from Greece.”
“Then why not simply fly me to Sebha?”
“We can’t get any intel on what you’d be walking into. For all we know, one of the militias would blow you out of the sky, or take the plane out on the runway. That’s part of the reason you need to go overland – to scope it out and report back on your preferred extraction method, based on what you see.”
“Sounds like I have to come up with the plan,” she stated flatly.
“No. Headquarters will come up with something. But the situation’s…fluid. They need eyes and ears on the ground.”
Jet was silent for a few moments. “Where are we going now?”
“To a warehouse on the south side of Tripoli. I’ve got a kit for you. Weapons. Comm gear. Your wheels.”
“You keep saying wheels. What kind?”
His grin widened. “Motorcycle.”
“I’m supposed to ride halfway across the country on a bike?”
“It’s the only way you’ll be nimble enough to avoid any roadblocks. And it’s not just any motorcycle. One of my cousins builds special-purpose dirt bikes for the rich. This thing will do a hundred over sand. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
“And that’s not going to attract attention?”
“Negative. It looks like a junker. Plenty of locals, including women, ride bikes. Best way to deal with traffic in a place like Tripoli.”
She sighed hea
vily. “I’m going to ride all day through some of the harshest desert on the planet? Where do I refuel, for starters?”
“Qaryat has gas. As of the last reports from truckers, it’s relatively safe. That’s about two hundred seventy-five kilometers from here. But you’ll also carry some fuel. It’s got a five-hundred-kilometer range, depending on how hard you run it.”
She did a quick calculation. “Not enough to get to Sebha.”
“Which is where the extra fuel will come in. But if you can, fill up in Qaryat. It isn’t clear what you’ll encounter in Sebha.”
She looked out the window at the scrubby bushes and concrete rubble. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
“You might want to lie low until late afternoon and ride in the evening and at night. Your choice. The heat’s going to be extreme during the day, but your headlight will give you away at night.”
“I don’t suppose you have any NV gear.”
“Sorry.”
The warehouse was in a wretched area that would have given the worst of Brazil or Venezuela a run for their money. Leo waved to a man with an AK who was guarding the entrance to the yard, and the man tossed him a half-hearted salute before continuing his observation of the street. Another gunman, also with an AK-47, was waiting inside the walls and came to meet the car as it rolled to a halt in front of a wide steel door. He pulled it open, and Leo escorted Jet around pallets of crates to where a motorcycle was sitting beside two forklifts.
Leo patted the seat with a smile. “I told you. It looks like it’s at the end of its life, but the engine’s new, and so’s the tranny and the suspension. We painted it to look half corroded, but it’s a land rocket and can take you anywhere you want to go. 500cc motor bored out to 650, trick gearing, knobbies for sand, the works.”
He showed her the saddlebags, which contained a 9mm Beretta pistol and three spare magazines, a Heckler & Koch MP7A1 submachine gun with four spares, a survival knife, a sat phone, six liters of water, a box of energy bars, and two robes in different colors. He tossed her a roll of dollars, which she caught without blinking.
Sahara Page 5