By 5:40, when they heard a vehicle honking at the front gate, Crocker felt like a boxer entering the final round. And he hadn’t even thrown a jab.
“My friend. My brother,” Farag said, climbing out of the old Toyota truck and wrapping Crocker in a hug. “Good to see you. You remember Mohi?”
He pointed to a wider, slightly taller young man with short hair who walked with a limp. It was the kid Crocker had given medical attention to after he’d taken two bullets in his hip.
“Mohi. It’s good to see you again. You’re all healed up?”
The teenager shook Crocker’s hand vigorously and smiled. Some of his front teeth were missing.
Farag’s face turned serious when Volman showed them the map and explained the situation in Arabic. He looked at Crocker, nodded as if he understood the gravity of what they faced, then glanced at the watch on his wrist and muttered something in Arabic.
“What did he say?” Crocker said.
“Loosely translated: Do not hate misfortune because maybe there is fortune for you inside it.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I know these areas,” Farag said in English. “We go fast.”
“As fast as possible.”
They climbed into the trucks. Farag led at a breakneck pace in the Toyota pickup with the Americans following in the Suburban. Within minutes Crocker spotted an airport tower ahead.
From the front seat, Volman explained, “This used to be Gaddafi’s airport. His compound wasn’t far from here. This part of the city experienced the heaviest fighting during the war.”
They passed the runway dotted with parked NATO warplanes and ran into a roadblock manned by armed men in black.
Crocker: “Who the fuck are they?”
Volman: “Beats me.”
They watched Farag lean out of the Toyota and shout at the men. They shouted back, with a lot of waving of guns and pointing.
Volman started to get out to join them.
Crocker said, “Maybe you should let him handle this.”
Volman went anyway.
“Doesn’t listen, does he?”
“Acts weird, but he’s smart,” Ritchie said.
The sun was starting to set, casting long shadows in the streets. Volman walked back toward them in his baggy pants, shirttail half out.
“We’re cool,” he said. “It’s a ragtag group of volunteers from the neighborhood. They say this area is relatively safe during the day but changes at night. They’ve experienced a lot of robberies, break-ins, kidnappings, rapes.”
“They know anything about a gang of Tuaregs operating in the area?”
“They’ve heard rumors about a group of thugs stealing cars and shipping them to Tunisia.”
“Are they Berber tribesmen? Did they say where we can find them?”
“That’s all they know.”
Stars were visible in the sky by the time the Toyota took off again in a cloud of dust. One of the men back at the roadblock lifted his AK-47 and fired it into the air.
“What the fuck was that for?” Davis asked.
Volman: “He got excited.”
They were in the Bu al Ashhar neighborhood. The Toyota screeched to a stop in front of the mosque, a blue domed structure with a minaret rising from one side. The streets around it were empty. The Arabic speakers in the group—Farag, Mohi, Volman, and Akil—went door to door, trying to elicit information.
The handful of men who were brave enough to answer said they’d seen some strangers in the area but no women, and no one they could identify as Tuareg. Nor could they describe the strangers they’d seen, except to say that some of them were armed.
They took off again and arrived at the second location after 9 p.m. Crocker’s stomach was killing him. The area in front of the police academy had also seen heavy fighting, since it was in the vicinity of Gaddafi’s heavily armed Bab al Azizia compound and Tripoli University. The academy was dark and its gate locked. Crocker saw no one on the streets, except the occasional vehicle passing on Al Hadhbah Road.
Again the four Arabic speakers knocked on the doors of nearby residential compounds and stores. Most of the latter were closed for the night. One man reported that he’d seen armed men getting out of vehicles beside the fence surrounding a field across the street from the academy.
Farag and Akil went to explore. They came back a few minutes later to retrieve their weapons.
“What’d you find?” Crocker asked.
“Something worth checking out.”
“What?”
Akil: “Follow me.”
Volman, Mancini, Davis, Ritchie, and Mohi waited beside the vehicles.
The sky glittered like a star-studded crown. A breeze picked up dust and threw it in Crocker’s face.