by Don Mann
Crocker was attending to both when an Aussie on his right washing his feet said, “They feel drier than a nun’s nasty.”
“Put some sesame oil on those puppies,” Crocker said, pointing to a bottle that was being passed along the line.
“Much obliged, mate.”
Mancini started complaining. “I thought we agreed we were going to run this together, as a team.”
“My bad,” Crocker answered. “Tomorrow we’ll try to stick together.”
Despite the myriad injuries, ranging from heat cramps, to heat exhaustion and heat stroke, to troubled bowels, twisted knees and ankles, and swollen feet, most contestants were determined to continue. They were doing this for a purpose—raising money for a cause, trying to achieve a personal goal.
About three dozen dropped out. Crocker watched as Berber volunteers loaded them into a truck for the ride back to Ouarzazate.
The mood among the remaining competitors was good. Someone passed a big bar of chocolate. An Aussie whipped up a vat of something called Miracle Beer—a beer made from powder he said he had purchased in the UK. One of the Brits played a harmonica and sang. Others joined in. Verses of “Maggie May,” “Wild Rover,” and “Satisfaction” floated through the dry night air.
Crocker had just fallen asleep when a sandstorm blew in and swept away their tent. He and the others crawled inside their sleeping bags, zipped them up, and tried to sleep through the storm. But sand managed to find its way into everything—teeth, noses, and ears.
When he did fall asleep, he dreamt he was at the controls of a huge jetliner flying over a city at dusk. Barely skimming over telephone poles and the tops of buildings, looking for a runway.
He still had enough liquid in his body to wake up in a sweat.
The morning sun was scorching from the start, which slowed their progress. Up and down, up and down. Monotonous and taxing. The sun seemed to draw every last drop of water out of them, resulting in constant thirst. Reminded Crocker of his days as a young SEAL with ST-1, training at Camp Niland in the California desert. Forty-mile hikes with seventy-pound packs in 114-degree heat. This had to be easy in comparison.
After about twenty kilometers they reached a flat stretch that they welcomed at first. But after a while the featureless terrain and the heaviness of the heat started to wear them down. The soles of their feet felt on fire.
Crocker started dreaming about summers on the beaches of New England as a kid. He and his younger brother catching sand crabs, body surfing, eating ice cream. He could taste it in his mouth—rich, creamy, cold, chocolate, strawberry, pistachio.
Beside him he heard Davis talking to his wife. He spoke as though she were walking beside him, telling her about the roof he was planning to build over their deck and how it was going to shade the back of the house. How he was going to plant fruit trees, too. Davis even started to argue, saying he wanted them to be cherry trees even though he knew she preferred peaches.
Crocker thought he saw a group of camels ahead but when he looked closer realized they were only swirls of heat.
After refreshing themselves at Checkpoint Three they faced a monstrous thousand-meter sand dune that took over an hour to climb. Crocker blacked out a couple of times but managed to keep walking.
The camp that night was overrun with happy Berber children willing to fetch water, wash clothes, and even sing and dance for a couple of ten-santimat coins. They lightened the mood considerably. The sky glittered with thousands of stars, many of which were rarely visible to the naked eye.
Crocker learned that his team, Eagle Bravo, was currently ranked thirty-fifth out of the 120 teams in competition. They would have been even higher if not for Akil, who was still suffering but refused to quit.
They exchanged stories with some of the Aussies and told filthy jokes. Akil managed to find a Frenchwoman who massaged his feet and calves.
Day three was a bitch, with endless dunes as far as the eye could see. The sand somehow seemed softer and deeper than before. It crumpled as soon as you touched it and caused them to sink halfway up to their knees with each footfall. Crocker felt he was about to hit a wall but refused to stop. He had to set an example for his men.
The sun burned through his Adidas Explorer sunglasses. The heat pounded his shoulders and neck.
He started to feel light-headed, then felt something touch his hand. It was a blond girl in a blue bikini. Her stride was strong and sure. They were walking down the beach together. He felt water lapping at his feet.
He turned to kiss her. “Kim?”
His first wife smiled and pushed back her hair.
“Hey, Kim.”
“You okay, boss?”
It was Ritchie, with his head and face wrapped in a white scarf.
Crocker thought he heard music as they approached the day’s destination, a little desert town called Tazzarine. Turned out the music was real. A local band played enthusiastically as girls danced in circles and shook tambourines. They ate lamb couscous for dinner and immediately passed out.
The next morning the sky was cloudy, and one of the organizers warned him that a storm was approaching. Crocker told his men to stick together. “They can blow in quickly, so stay alert.”
Fortunately, the first set of dunes wasn’t as high as those of the previous day, and the sun wasn’t as strong.
After an hour of trekking they stopped at a water hole to wash their faces and refill their bottles. Cal was leaning back in the sand, looking up at the clouds, when he ripped out the earbuds of his iPod and shouted, “That fucking hurt!”
“What?”
Crocker saw that a yellow sand scorpion (Opistophthalmus) about two inches long had bitten the palm of his right hand. He washed the area with water and noted that the site of the sting was becoming red and swollen.
Even after he applied a local anesthetic, Cal continued to complain about the pain. He also reported a tingling, twitchy sensation up his right arm.
“It’s my trigger hand,” Cal said, grimacing. “Maybe it’s karma.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Payback for all the people I’ve killed.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Crocker knew that in some cases scorpion poisoning could cause shock and even death. He wished he had some tetanus toxoid with him, but he’d have to make do, because they wouldn’t reach the next medical aid and communications point until evening. So he wrapped his Buff headband around Cal’s right wrist to restrict the poison.
Meanwhile the sky had darkened and the wind had picked up. A cloud of fine red dust enveloped them. Huge balls of desert brambles raced across the sand.
“Where’d they come from?” Akil shouted.
“Seek cover, but stay away from the leeward side of the dunes. Keep your scarves secured over your nose, ears, and mouth. Make sure you keep your sunglasses on. Goggles, if you have them!” Crocker yelled back.
Within minutes visibility was zero. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. Each gust of wind carried with it a blast of highly abrasive sand that felt like it could rip the skin right off your body.
Crocker wrapped the thin Tyvek sheet he carried in his backpack around Cal and led him over to the water hole, where they knelt behind the stump of an old palm tree. It was hard to breathe.
Cal started to shiver. “How long is this likely to last?”
“Don’t think about that.”
After half an hour Crocker released the headband around Cal’s wrist, held his arm in the water for approximately five minutes, then secured the headband again, just tight enough to slow the flow of blood. He repeated the process a half hour later. Then the wind abated and the air started to clear. Within five minutes the sky overhead was blue and the sun was beating down strongly.
“Amazing,” Cal said.
“You feeling better?”
“My arm is killing me, and the rest of my body feels like shit.”
Five men were accounted for, but Akil was missing
. They found him on the other side of a dune, wrapped in a blanket and covered with sand, and helped him dig out.
“You enjoy that, desert rat?”
“I think I dozed off.”
Or maybe he’d lost consciousness from sheer exhaustion. But as they walked he seemed to be his same happy-go-lucky self, talking about the movie The Mummy and one of his favorite actresses, Rachel Weisz. He was convinced that she’d fall for him if they ever met, and the others were too exhausted to tell him he was full of shit. Crocker helped Cal, who was slipping in and out of a fever. Hot one minute, freezing cold the next.
When they reached the night’s camp, the nurse there gave Cal a shot of tetanus toxoid, and he started to improve. His hand hurt, but his temperature and pulse returned to normal.
Akil’s mouth was still working, but his feet were beat to shit. And even though Mancini didn’t complain, he appeared to be favoring his left leg.
One more day, Crocker said to himself as he poured hot water into a cupful of noodles. One of the Aussies shook a bucket of sand out of his long brown hair.
Someone tapped the SEAL chief on the shoulder. “Mr. Crocker?” the man asked. He was dressed head to toe in khaki and wore a bristling black mustache.
“Yeah.” Wondering if he was seeing a mirage.
“You’re Mr. Crocker?”
“That’s correct.”
The man bowed from the waist and handed Crocker a folded piece of paper. He read it quickly in the mottled light of the various lamps. At the end he saw the name Lou Donaldson, and he felt his sphincters tighten.
“Now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He wants us to withdraw from this race?”
“Affirmative, sir.”
“Does he realize that we’re half a day away from completing this sucker?”
“I believe he does, sir. Yes.”
Focusing on the typed instructions, he read them again carefully. Ritchie saw him reading and knelt beside him.
“What’s up, boss?”
Crocker folded the letter and handed it back to the waiting man. “Give us ten minutes to pack everything.”
“We’re leaving?”
“Seems like.”
The man in khaki pointed past a mud wall to a dirt road. “The vehicles are waiting over there, sir.”
“Ten-four.”
Ritchie again, at his elbow. “Boss, what is it? What’s he want?”
“We’re going to Rabat. We’ve got orders. Tell the others. Help them organize the gear.”
Chapter Five
From the halls of Montezuma,
To the shores of Tripoli;
We fight our country’s battles;
In the air, on land, and sea…
—U.S. Marine Corps hymn
Crocker, limping on sore legs, followed Jim Anders through the gate of the U.S. embassy in Rabat, Morocco, muttering a silent prayer for the marine guards and other embassy personnel who had died there less than a year ago, victims of an al-Qaeda truck bomb.
He’d slept a few hours on the Gulfstream jet that had transported them from the heat of Ouarzazate to the Moroccan capital, where it was cool and green. Even though he’d just showered and shaved, he still smelled the desert on his skin.
So far he’d been given no reason why he and his men had had to quit the race. A part of him was hoping they were being ordered home.
He proceeded into the embassy building, where a marine behind ballistic glass instructed him to step around the body scanner and enter.
“Welcome, sir.” Cordial and correct. Marine security guards like him were on duty at 150 embassies and consulates around the world.
Into an elevator to the fourth floor. Crocker was somewhat disoriented. Instead of endless desert, he was walking through a narrow hall, past a blonde in a tight white skirt. The sound of her high heels clicking against the tiled floor reminded him of a scene from an old British movie with a youngish Michael Caine.
Sometimes he missed the chase, especially when he’d been away from home more than a month.
Their destination was a windowless room on the fourth floor that they accessed only after passing through a vault door, which meant they had entered the CIA station. There, Jim Anders asked a female officer to pull up some files from the server.
“Which ones?”
“Scorpion.”
“Yes, sir.” She had short brown hair and a wide face with small features. On her wrist she wore a Timex Adventure Tech Digital Compass watch like the one he’d given Holly for her fortieth birthday.
Scorpion? Crocker repeated in his head. The word intrigued him.
They sat in a room with a half dozen serious-looking men and one woman. The lights went out and images danced on a screen. Crocker recognized the puffy face of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, former dictator of Libya. He had previously seen footage of Gaddafi’s capture, sodomization, and murder, and he was familiar with some of the highlights, or low points, of his career—namely his connection to Pan Am Flight 103, which had been blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, and other acts of terror; his vanity and extravagant personal spending; and more recently his attempted rapprochement with the U.S. and his infatuation with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
He had always regarded the Libyan strongman as a very dangerous buffoon. A madman.
What he was watching now on the large monitor at the front of the room was grainy black-and-white footage of Gaddafi made in early 2011, toward the end of his forty-year reign. He knew this because of the time stamp at the bottom of the image.
“Clandestine tape of an internal meeting,” Anders remarked.
Gaddafi was dressed in a tribal robe and cap, sitting behind a big desk. He was speaking to a group of military officers in the Libyan dialect of Arabic, which Crocker couldn’t understand. He knew a few words of Arabic, enough to get by in a pinch, but this was different and delivered too fast for him to decipher.
At one point Gaddafi slapped the desk and shouted a word that sounded like ala-kurab. Even though Crocker didn’t know what the word meant, he understood it to be a threat. When Gaddafi spit out the word again, Anders punched a button on the remote control he was holding and paused the disc.
“Scorpion,” Anders said, turning to Crocker.
“What?”
“He’s threatening his enemies with ala-kurab, which means ‘scorpion.’ ”
“What enemies?”
“Anyone who opposes him—the Libyan opposition, al-Qaeda, even NATO.”
“What is Scorpion, exactly?”
“The name of Gaddafi’s WMD program, which supposedly shut down in 2004.”
“Oh.”
“He’s telling his military commanders that if NATO continues its bombing campaign and the Libyan people continue to turn against him, he’ll unleash Scorpion.”
“Which he never did.”
“No. In the end he turned out to be a romantic like Che Guevara instead of a psychopath like Stalin.”
Crocker wasn’t sure about the comparison to Che Guevara, but he got the point.
“But he’s dead, right?” he said. “So, end of story.”
“Not necessarily. If the WMDs exist, we might have a problem,” Anders countered.
“Why?”
“Because our chief there thinks that the country is about to come apart. The ambassador doesn’t agree. But we don’t want to take a chance.”
Anders pressed another button and the blurry image of a different man filled the screen—scruffy dark beard and intense eyes. At first Crocker thought he was looking at a picture of a young Gaddafi, but the nose and hair were different.
“Who we looking at?” Crocker asked.
“Anaruz Mohammed, one of Gaddafi’s illegitimate sons. He seems to have had many. Anaruz has reentered the country and has been organizing militant Gaddafi loyalists in the south.”
“What about him?”
“He’s just one of the potential threats against the Libyan transitional
government, known as the National Transitional Council, which we and our allies support.”
“There are others?”
“Yes. But we think this kid is particularly dangerous.”
“Why?”
“He’s a chip off the old block.”
“In other words a delusional nut case with charisma,” one of the other officers added.
“And his mother is a Tuareg, part of a group of nomadic warriors that lives in southern Libya in a swath of desert that also runs through Niger, Chad, and Algeria. They’ve been a problem since the French colonized the area in the twenties.”
Crocker had heard of them and knew they were one of the many Berber tribes that dominated southern Libya.
A map appeared on the screen highlighting the area.
“The Tuaregs were intensely loyal to Gaddafi, because he rescued them in the early seventies when they were starving. Saved their butts. In return, they fought for him like tigers during the recent war. At least two thousand served in his army. Now they’re a concern.”
“Why?” Crocker asked.
“The NTC has been trying to wipe them out. In January there were a couple of serious battles near the village of Menaka, not far from the border with Niger.”
He pointed to a spot on the map that Crocker considered one of the most forgotten, desolate places in the world.
He asked himself, Who cares?
“The Tuaregs are under siege, so they’ve formed alliances,” Anders continued. “One is with the terrorist organization called al-Qaeda Maghreb. Another is with the Chinese. A third is with Iran.”
The mention of China and Iran got Crocker’s attention.
“Why are the Chinese and Iranians interested in a nomadic tribe in the Sahara desert?” he asked.
Anders turned and looked him in the eye. “Uranium.”
“Uranium?”
“Lots of it. Specifically, mines in northern Niger. For the last forty years they’ve been controlled by the French. But now the Chinese and their Iranian buddies want them, and they’re using the Tuaregs and al-Qaeda to extend their influence in the area.”