SEAL Team Six Hunt the Scorpion(22)

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.”