SEAL Team Six Hunt the Scorpion(36)
“You’re fine. Any mention of the Sheraton bombing on the news?”
“Some still pictures. Nothing about casualties.”
“That’s because the war is over, so reporters are busy elsewhere. What’d the doc say about your head?”
“I should expect headaches the next couple of days. Probably lost a shitload of brain cells. Otherwise, I’m fine.”
“Maybe you should take some emergency medical leave, spend some time with your family.” Davis and his wife had an infant son and another baby due in six months.
He asked, “What’s going on with Cal?”
“He’s leaving in the morning to spend some time with his mom.”
“Then you need me.”
Sometimes team spirit and loyalty got in the way. “Think about it,” Crocker said.
“As long as I’ve got plenty of eight-hundred-milligram Motrin, I’ll be fine.”
They ate at a long table in the kitchen. Mancini had whipped up a big bowl of pasta with tomatoes, capers, peppers, and canned tuna. Pretty damn good, under the circumstances. They were talking, eating, and listening to Raj Music on the radio when they heard someone banging on the gate.
It was John Lasher, carrying several shopping bags that contained DVDs, paperbacks for Davis, peanut butter, crackers, bars of chocolate, boxes of energy bars, and bottles of Italian wine. The back of his SUV was loaded with hazmat suits, digital Geiger counters, a bolt cutter, a couple of acetylene torches, maps and charts.
As Crocker helped him carry the gear in, Lasher turned to him and asked, “How do you know Farag Shakir?”
Because his mind was clouded with exhaustion, it took him a moment to remember. “Farag? Yeah, Farag. He’s the brave kid who fought beside me at the Sheraton last night.”
“He asked me to thank you for helping save his cousin’s life.”
“I didn’t know the injured boy was his cousin. How is he?”
“Hanging on, apparently.”
“Tough kid, that Farag. What’s his background?”
“He’s from one of the tribes west of here, near the Tunisian border, called Zintani. Ended up in Tripoli during the war for one reason or another. He wants to be helpful, so we’ve used him for a couple of things, mainly for backup security. That’s why he was at the Sheraton last night.”
After they finished eating, Lasher spread out a map of Libya on the table with several locations circled in red. He explained that he was a former marine major and UN weapons inspector in Iraq, then said, “Remington wants us to do this quickly and low profile, so we’ll focus on the three most important sites.”
“I was in Iraq, too,” Crocker said. “March 2003, right after it fell. Minutes after I landed, I ran into the chief of CIA Operations at the airport. He said, ‘Crocker, if you came here looking for WMDs, you’re not gonna find any.’ ”
Lasher: “I worked for Scott Ritter when we did the UN inspections. We knew that months before the invasion.”
Crocker had learned not to try to second-guess the president or his foreign policy team, but he wasn’t afraid to call out a mistake if he saw one. “Fucked up, huh?”
“A major international black eye, yeah. But at least we took down Saddam.”
“Sure did.”
Lasher pointed to one of the red circles, only a short distance west of Tripoli. “We might as well start with the closest one, Busetta, which was Gaddafi’s former naval base. I’m not sure what’s left of it now.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Mustard gas, stocks of VX gas, missile engines, ingredients for the production of missile fuel, shells, chemical bombs.”
Crocker knew that VX was a very dangerous nerve agent developed by the British, a compound of organic phosphorus and sulfur that can penetrate the skin and disrupt the transmission of nerve impulses, causing paralysis and death.
“And you think these weapons exist?” he asked.
“NATO claims to have inspected the sites.”
“But you don’t trust them?”
“We know that Gaddafi vowed to dismantle his WMD program after the Iraq War. But instead of destroying anything, he spent the next eight years playing cat and mouse with the international community. According to our intel, at the time of his death his regime was in possession of at least 9.5 metric tons of mustard gas and 100 metric tons of VX.”
“Code name Scorpion.”
“Yeah, Scorpion. Designed to strike when no one’s looking.”
“How much of that mustard gas and VX has NATO recovered?”
“Almost none.”
“Then it looks like we’ve got a real job to do.”