SEAL Team Six Hunt the Scorpion(21)

“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.