Jabril strapped himself into the seat next to him and said, “My friends and I are worried about the future of our country.”
“I would be, too, if I were a Libyan.”
They were only a few minutes aloft and were already passing over endless tracts of desert.
Jabril, who was in a talkative mood, started sharing his impressions of Gaddafi. How he used to sit around a fire in the backyard of his compound and talk all night—about his dreams for Libya, his theories of human evolution, and the relations between men and women.
He spent most of his time outdoors, despite the fact that he’d built a palace decorated with a white baby grand piano, indoor pools, a golden mermaid sofa, and closets stocked with his eccentric wardrobe, ranging from uniforms covered in gold braid to African tribal gowns.
He considered swine flu a biological weapon, and had even designed and built his own car, called the Rocket, which he called the world’s safest automobile. Why had he built it? To better protect his people, many of whom were killed and injured on Libyan roads every year.
Crocker nodded and listened politely. If nothing else, Jabril was helping him keep his mind off his own problems.
“Have you ever heard the name Sheik Zubair?” the scientist asked.
“I don’t believe so.”
“Gaddafi believed that William Shakespeare was really a poet from Basra, Iraq. He claimed to have studied Shakespeare and discovered a strong resemblance in his work to the teaching of the Zenith sect of Islam.”
“That sounds pretty out there.”
“I agree. But aren’t all men shades of gray? Even Gaddafi did some positive things.”
“For example?”
“He gave everyone in Libya free electricity, free health care, and free education. All loans were interest free. Gasoline cost fourteen cents a gallon. The country was debt free.”
“Then why was he overthrown?”
“My friends claim it was more like a coup d’etat from abroad,” Jabril answered.
“A coup?”
The elfin-faced scientist nodded. “My friends are sophisticated men. Businessmen, professors. They opposed Gaddafi, but claim that anti-Gaddafi sentiment was never very strong.”
Crocker wasn’t particularly interested in Libyan politics and had no way of judging if what Jabril was saying was true. Still, he nodded and listened politely.
“A coup d’etat from abroad to get two things, oil and gold,” Jabril continued.
Oil sounded reasonable, but…“Gold?”
“Gold, yes.” Jabril grinned and leaned closer. “Gaddafi owned one hundred and fifty tons of gold that he kept in banks in Tripoli. He was also talking about introducing an African currency called the gold dinar, which would have rivaled the dollar and euro, and shifted the economic balance.”
“Shifted it which way?”
“Oil would no longer have been traded exclusively in dollars.”
“And your friends believe that’s why Gaddafi was overthrown?”
The Libyan raised a crooked index finger. “Consider this. In the year 2000, Saddam Hussein announced that Iraqi oil would be traded in euros instead of dollars. Sanctions and war followed, and he was ousted. The same thing happened to Gaddafi.”
Crocker wasn’t a big believer in conspiracy theories. He’d heard them all—the Illuminati were secretly running the world, or the Rothschild banks, the oil cartels, the drug cartels, Opus Dei.
After two more hours of listening to the doctor reminisce about his childhood in Libya and his wife and children, they touched down in Sebha. As he exited the aircraft and felt the midday heat bearing down on him, Crocker noticed several MiG-25s parked beside the runway. “They used to be a mainstay of Gaddafi’s air force,” said Lasher. “Now they belong to the NTC. Trouble is, they don’t have anyone to fly them, because all the pilots left the country.”
They piled into a van for the short ride to the military base, past a domed mosque and a large hill of sand with a castle on top that Jabril said had been built by the Italians in the 1930s, when Libya was still a colony.
Sebha appeared to be a sleepy, windswept town. The streets were paved and modern, most of the buildings white one- or two-story dwellings.
Akil pointed out the green pro-Gaddafi flags flying from a number of houses and vehicles. “What’s that about?”
“Curious,” Lasher answered. “I noticed them, too.”
The base looked abandoned, except for two elderly men in olive-green uniforms who guarded the gate. It was surrounded by a ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and consisted of several barracks, a shed with two disabled tanks inside, a shooting range, and a water tower that looked like it hadn’t been used in years.