SEAL Team Six Hunt the Scorpion(56)
Meanwhile, Mancini joined the other men, who were sitting in the shade, and explained what they had found. At the mention of uranium hexafluoride Lasher jumped to his feet. “Jesus Christ! You found UF6? You’re kidding. Where?”
“The ampoules are in the canister we carried out. Right there.”
Lasher ran over to it and examined the labels and writing on the outside.
Mancini warned, “It’s leaking radioactivity, so don’t get too close.”
Lasher said, “It was shipped to Tajoura in 2010. In 2010!”
Davis: “What’s Tajoura?”
“It’s a nuclear research facility about ten miles east of Tripoli. Houses a research lab and a ten-megawatt reactor built by the Soviets. But it was shut down in 2004, after Gaddafi told the world he was abandoning his plan to build a nuclear weapon. Back in March of that year the IAEA oversaw the removal of weapons-grade enriched uranium from Tajoura, which was then shipped to the Russian Federation.”
“Incredible,” Mancini muttered, shaking his head.
“Why is it here?” Crocker asked.
Lasher: “Good question.”
“What’s it mean?” Davis asked.
“It’s a smoking gun,” Lasher offered. “The proof that Scorpion is real—a lethal weapon buried in the desert sand.”
“A smoking gun in what sense?”
“The presence of UF6 proves that Gaddafi was still trying to build a nuclear weapon after the invasion of Iraq and the whole furor over WMDs. Back in 2004 he was afraid he was going to be invaded next. Made a speech before the UN, telling the whole world that he was going to play nice from now on.”
“What do we do with it now?” Crocker asked.
Lasher: “Was that the only green canister?”
Mancini: “There were about a dozen more like it.”
“You check those, too?”
“No.”
Lasher: “Doesn’t matter. We’ll take this one back as evidence. NATO will have to figure out how to deal with the rest.”
Jabril was feeling better. He said, “It’s too dangerous to handle.”
Lasher: “I brought a lead sheet in the truck. We’ll wrap it in the lead sheet and take it with us.”
Crocker: “Sounds like a plan.”
They’d parked the van at the second gate—the one that connected the military base to the chemical plant. Lasher and Ritchie volunteered to walk back and get it.
While the others waited, Crocker and Davis went to explore the far side of the hill. There they found a vent hidden behind a boulder, but nothing else.
Davis said, “Sometimes I wonder what kind of world we brought our kids into.”
“It was a hell of a lot easier to defend yourself when men fought with rocks and slingshots,” Crocker answered.
“You read about all this apocalyptic end-of-time stuff and it makes you wonder.”
“Sure does.”
They sat in the shade talking about how advances in technology, designed to make the world safer, seemed to be having the opposite effect. Crocker heard a car horn honk three times.
“There’s the van,” he said getting to his feet.
He had taken half a dozen steps around the hill when he heard angry voices speaking Arabic, and stopped.
“What’s wrong?” Davis asked.
“Listen,” Crocker whispered back, pointing to the other side of the hill, then holding a finger to his lips.
Davis looked perplexed.
Very carefully, Crocker craned his head around the edge of the hill to look. In the distance he saw the van driving away, accompanied by two white pickups armed with .50-caliber machine guns. In the foreground, approximately two hundred feet from where he was standing, a dozen men wearing black and brown kaffiyehs pointed automatic weapons at Mancini and Jabril, who were seated on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs.
As Crocker watched, the armed men led Mancini and Jabril to two more white pickup trucks, pushed them into the back, then piled in themselves and drove off, leaving behind a cloud of dust. The canister was gone.
“Who the hell are they?” Davis asked.
“I didn’t see any patches or insignia. Did you?”
“No, but there was a green flag painted on the door of the truck.”
“Fuck.”
The two SEALs ran along the back of the three hills and arrived at the fence surrounding the military base. Seeing parked pickups on the other side, they hid behind some rocks and waited almost an hour, until the sky started to turn dark, so they could enter the base with a diminished risk of being discovered.
“What do we do now?” Davis asked.
“First we climb the fence. Then we try to find our guys.”
Chapter Eleven