Last Year
30°8' N, 9°30' E
Libyan Desert, Tunisian Border near Ghadamis
395 Miles South of Tripoli
CHECKPOINT,” SAID JANSON.
Two Toyota pickups, angled nose to nose a mile ahead. The narrow oiled road, a service track for a string of high-tension power lines, was banked six or eight feet above the rolling desert. A tracked combat vehicle and a trained driver might get around it. A stolen taxi with an amateur at the wheel didn’t have a hope.
“Government or rebel?” asked Kincaid. She sat in back with a dented Leica slung from her neck.
Janson, sitting in front to calm the driver, scoped the pickups with an eight-power monocular lens. Civilians caught between loyalists and rebels clogged the roads to the border, so he had directed the taxi farther south through hot, windblown land edged by rock ridges and speckled with the pyramidal silhouettes of camels grazing on thin groundcover.
He steadied the instrument with two hands. “Black mercenaries … bullpup assault rifles … truck on the left is towing a Type 63 rocket launcher.”
Kincaid hid their rebel pass under the driver’s seat and handed Janson government-issued business visas sponsored by a Tripoli importer of irrigation pumps for the Great Man-Made River Project Authority. Young and fit, she wore a scarf over her short brown hair, loose cargo pants, and a baggy, sweat-stained long-sleeved shirt. Her papers said she worked for the publicity department of the Infrastructure and Minerals unit of KBR. She sat still as ice.
Janson’s visa named him a hydraulic engineering manager with the same unit. He was older than Kincaid, a nondescript man with iron-gray, close-cropped hair. Faint lines of scar tissue on his hands and face and a hint of bulk under his loose shirt suggested a career ladder that had started at the bottom as an oil-patch roughneck slogging through night school. He was as calm as the woman in the backseat, almost serene.
“We’ll get through this fine,” he told the driver. “Just take it easy.”
It was clear to the driver that neither American understood the danger. African mercenaries were trigger happy in the best of times. They’d be better off facing rebels who were anxious to look good on CNN. The government’s foreign soldiers did not care what the world thought; their backs were to the wall, and for them it was win or die.
Worse, the officer commanding the checkpoint wore the insignia of the 32nd Brigade, the infamous Deterrent Battalion. He was not about to “join the people’s struggle.” Not only did he enjoy elite status, he knew that rich rewards awaited the officer who captured the dictator’s turncoat son. If the traitor was lucky enough to be caught by the rebels instead of the loyalists, they might preserve him as a hostage. The loyalists would kill him, and whoever delivered the traitor’s head to his father would receive a medal and a villa in the best neighborhood.
The soldiers raised their rifles.
“Slow down,” said Janson. “Keep both hands on the wheel.” He laid his own hands in full view on the dashboard, papers under his left. Kincaid gripped the back of the driver’s seat with hers.
The driver, a bare-headed man in his thirties dressed in fake designer jeans and a shabby white shirt—the costume of North Africa’s disaffected hordes of overeducated underemployed—felt an overwhelming impulse to stomp on the accelerator and run down the soldiers. If he stopped, the best they could hope for was the mercenaries would rough them up and tear the car apart. God help the woman if the officer let them at her. Would it not be better to take a chance and put their fate in the hands of Allah?
“Slow down,” Janson repeated. “Do not provoke them.”
Everything he and Kincaid had encountered trying to cross the border—fear-crazed civilians, jumpy mercenaries, roving rebel units—indicated that the revolution had tumbled into chaos. No surprise after forty years of rule by a psychotic. But the fact that the loyalists were utterly distracted by a mad hunt to catch one foolish traitor took the cake.
The psychotic dictator, the self-named “Lion of the Desert,” had spawned eight sons. Four of them—the playboy, the Army commander, the family’s oil-company director, and the transport minster—were national figures seen regularly on state TV and feted abroad in Rome and Paris. Another, who had become an obscure imam in a remote province, had disappeared behind a priestly beard; and the gay one who had fled to Milan hadn’t been seen in years. The same was true of the youngest son, Yousef—“The Cub”—who had studied computer science in the United States.
The Cub’s face was not familiar, his photograph never published. The best intelligence confirmed that he had won trust from his father that his brothers never had because he had modernized internal security to control cell-phone communication and Internet access. Twitter and Facebook were indulged at the Lion’s pleasure. He could shut them down with a word.
Hope that Yousef would steer the old despot in enlightened directions had been shattered in the first bloody days of the revolt when the Lion vowed to fight to the death. The Army was fragmenting, his cabinet resigning, and murderous civil war was certain. The political standoff and the threat of NATO bombing had even some loyalists whispering for the old man’s ouster.
Yousef had panicked, fearing prosecution for war crimes. Then Italy offered an out. Trying to stop the slaughter, and positioning herself as a savior of the oil-state’s business elite, Italy promised asylum. Like everything else in the conflict, it had come too late. Before Yousef could surrender, the fighting turned chaotic. He was on the run, last seen in the oasis town of Ghadamis.
“Slow down!” Janson repeated, hard as a round racked into a chamber. The driver took his foot off the gas, convinced that if he tried to run the checkpoint, Janson would kill him before the soldiers could fire their rifles.
The soldiers gestured them out of the car. The Deterrent Battalion officer glanced at their papers. “Open the trunk.”
“No key,” said the driver.
“Shoot the lock.” The mercenaries aimed casually in the general direction of the lock, sprayed a dozen rounds, then aimed carefully as one stood to the side and tipped the lid up with the barrel of his rifle.
The trunk held a bullet-riddled spare tire and a bright green Libya national soccer bag. The officer opened it. His eyes widened. He plunged his hand inside and withdrew a banded stack of hundred-euro bills. “Is this yours?”
Janson said, “No. I had no idea it was in there. Perhaps you could take charge of it.”
The officer gestured, and a soldier sprayed the taxi’s hood with a crescent of green paint. “Go. If you run into any more checkpoints, that will get you through. Sorry for the inconvenience. Tell the world you were treated decently.”
The officer cuffed the driver on the back of his head and kicked his leg, herding him back to the car. The driver stiffened at the insult. Janson shoved him behind the wheel. Kincaid called to the officer, “May I take your photograph, please?”
An engaging smile warmed her face. The officer squared his shoulders for her camera, wondering how he had missed at first glance that she was an unusually attractive woman.
Janson walked unhurriedly around the front of the taxi, climbed in, and said, “Drive. Before they change their mind.”
The driver stomped the accelerator and the old taxi rolled away.
The green spray-paint pass and a hundred-euro bribe got them across the border.
Tunisian authorities, overwhelmed with refugees desperate for food, water, and shelter, waved them on to the airport. A twin-engine Embraer Legacy 650 landed. The long-haul executive jet was owned by Catspaw Associates—Janson’s corporate-security/consultant outfit of independent contractors linked 24/7 by Internet and secure phone into an ethereal amalgam of freelance researchers, IT specialists, and field agents.
Janson and Kincaid helped their pilots unload tents, blankets, and bottled water. Fifteen minutes after the plane touched down, its big Rolls-Royce engines hurled it back into the sky carrying Paul Janson, Jessica Kincaid, and the dictator’s son Yousef dressed like an overeducated, underemployed North African taxi driver