* * *
For his part, Aref Saleh just stared at the silent bearded man while Miguel spoke. Haroom did not mask the malevolence he felt toward Saleh, and after a minute of the angry glare, Saleh interrupted Miguel by speaking directly to Haroom. “I see it in your eyes, brother. You judge me for what I do. You judge me for what I did for Libya.”
David Doyle said nothing.
“I have great respect for you and your cause. I have provided many of your fellow mujahideen with weapons at prices that were below my expenses.”
Doyle did not believe this for a second, but he did not challenge the statement.
The Libyan stared for a long time before saying, “Still, young brother, I would ask you to refrain from your overt malevolence. You are a guest here in my home.”
Doyle did not speak. Neither did he change his demeanor.
Finally Saleh broke the staring contest with a shrug and a smile. He looked to his men in the room with him. “Very well, my Yemeni brother. As you wish. Give me your evil look. I am a gentleman, however. I will take your money and not subject you to the same wicked stare. If I did not need to be friends with Colonel Gaddafi to work for him, I certainly do not need to be friends with you to take your money.”
Doyle spoke now for the first time. “And I do not need to be friends with you, Mr. Saleh, to purchase your goods.”
Upon hearing his real surname, Aref Saleh sat up straighter in his chair. His faint and insincere smile disappeared.
“I do not know your accent, young brother, but you are not a Yemini. It appears that you come from a land where a man has no problem with intemperance. You have contacts who have uncovered my identity. I am impressed. But you put me in a difficult position by announcing that you know who I am. You would do well to hold your tongue. Absolute trust is another component that is not necessary in order for us to do business, but I will not work with someone whose malice I take as a direct threat.”
“I do not need to trust you, either.” Doyle’s Arabic betrayed him as a nonnative speaker, but not necessarily as an American. “I only need to know how to find you if you double-cross me.” He smiled slowly. “And now that you know I can do just that, we can proceed.”
Saleh’s bushy eyebrows rose. Behind him, two of his guards stepped forward, ready for a fight. Miguel started to stand from his chair.
Saleh stopped them all by raising his hand. He addressed the man with the odd accent.
“Do you really believe you hold all the advantages here, brother Haroom?”
“No. I am unarmed, as is my colleague. I only attempt to level the playing field by letting you know that my organization has identified you, so that if you attempt to trick me—”
“Yes, yes. Your people can find me.”
“Exactly.”
Saleh wiggled his fingers and his men moved back into the corners of the room, though they remained on guard. He said, “Very well. Our mutually assured destruction has been established. I hope all this work on your part indicates that you are prepared to make a purchase.”
“I would like nothing more.”
After a moment’s more consideration, Saleh called out to men in the next room. Within seconds two men entered. They wore business suits, but instead of briefcases they hefted a green wooden crate between them. It was over five feet long but narrow, not more than two feet wide and deep. They placed it on the floor next to the two men from Yemen.
Saleh said, “I give you one of the most lethal portable air defense systems ever made. The Igla-S portable antiaircraft missile complex, or Igla-S PAAMC.
Igla
is a Russian word that means ‘needle.’”
Al-Amriki knew all about the Igla, but he allowed Saleh to make his sales pitch.
“The weapon has a three- to four-kilometer vertical range, and it possesses high jamming immunity due to its impeccable infrared target-acquisition system. It has a contact and a proximity fuse, and a powerful warhead. It is small enough that one could, with some difficulty, carry two on his back, or a half dozen of the launchers along with missiles and power sources in the average two-door hatchback.”
The AQ men knelt over the weapon and scanned the markings and the serial number, even the writing on the wooden case. Doyle found what he was looking for immediately, the shipping label. The consignee was the Central Organization of Industry and Purchase in Libya, and the airport of destination was the Tripoli International Airport. Inscribed also on the case was
2006. Box 88 of 243
. He’d been told by al Qaeda spies with contacts in the Libyan Defense community to look for these markings. If Saleh were trying to peddle counterfeit weapons, he would not necessarily know to replicate the authentic shipping labels and crate stamps.
After a minute of handling the weapon—the missile was not seated in the launch tube and the power source was not attached, so there was no chance of an accidental discharge in the well-appointed living room—the two men from AQAP sat back down in their chairs and faced Aref Saleh. The Libyan could see that the mood had lightened perceptibly. These terrorist commanders were, at the end of the day, just stupid boys, Aref determined after witnessing their reverence when running their fingers over the weapon system.
“So,” he said. “Do you have any questions I can answer?”
The one called Haroom said, “I will need some proof that they work as advertised.”
“Proof?” asked Saleh with genuine confusion. “I think you just need to check the lot numbers against the missing—”
“I
believe
they are authentic Libyan arms. Of that I have no doubt. But you have told us they are easy to operate. Is this true? I mean to say, can a quickly trained operator fire one as easily as you say he can?”
“Of course. The instructions are barely two pages in length.”
Doyle shrugged, said, “I want to fire one. At an aircraft.”
Saleh waved his hand in the air. “That is ridiculous.”
Doyle then said, “I will purchase one launcher. You will help us find a suitable location to fire it. A suitable target. If this test goes well, we will buy sixty missiles from you.”
“
Sixty?
” Saleh said it in disbelief. This was four times the number he had hoped for.
“That is correct.”
The Libyan thought the man was toying with him. “I don’t have time for games. You were vetted by my people as a legitimate representative of your organization, so I agreed to meet with you, but I will now ask you to please leave.”
“We will pay four hundred thousand dollars each for sixty weapons.”
The Libyan cocked his head, tried to read the man across the table. Finally he said softly, “You are serious.”
David Doyle leaned forward. “Contingent on the successful test-firing of one weapon against a commercial aircraft.”
Saleh said, as much to himself as to his customers, “Twenty-four million dollars.”
Haroom corrected him. “We will pay for the test SAM, as well. So, twenty-four million four hundred thousand.”
“I see,” said Saleh, his voice registering his amazement. “I think this can be arranged with some effort and research.”
For a chance at $24 million, Aref Saleh would find these boys a damn airplane to blow out of the sky.
SIX
Tripoli, Libya
Dr. Renny Marris had been in this line of work long enough that he should have felt the eyes on him, but he felt nothing but the warmth of the Mediterranean sun on his face as he stepped out of the massive Corinthian Bab Africa Hotel, just two blocks from the Mediterranean seashore. It was just past eleven a.m. and he had been hard at work with neither food nor drink since daybreak, so he decided to get out of his dark suit and into the bustling streets for lunch, even if he’d have to bring some of his work along with him.
Marris walked past the taxi stand in front of the hotel and then continued on foot up the steps to the parking garage. Over his shoulder he wore a worn canvas messenger bag that bulged with files and folders full of his work. He knew better than to take these documents out of his suite, but time was short and he had a lot to do, so he allowed himself this transgression with barely a moment’s thought.
Marris was a man who lived more in his work than in the world around him.
He slid into the driver’s seat of his two-door Mazda with some effort. He was a big man, a shade over six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds, much of it a thick middle that seemed to spread more and more each month since he’d reached the age of fifty, five years prior.
The burly Canadian drove out of the hotel grounds, then headed east through thick midday traffic on the palm-tree-lined Al Kurnish Road. The blue waters of the Med were on his left, and on his right was the Medina, the old city. A massive array of tightly packed whitewashed buildings and narrow streets and alleys that covered several square kilometers, it had begun as an ancient settlement by the Phoenicians in the seventh century, and now comprised just a tiny tip of Tripoli’s wide oceanfront.
Though he was not a particularly fit man, he was not worried about venturing out among the locals. Apart from the petty crime rife in many Third World cities, Tripoli, Libya, was safe enough for most of the thousands of Westerners living and working there, now one year after the overthrow and death of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.
It was safe enough for
most
Westerners. But it was not safe at all for Dr. Renny Marris.
He was blissfully unaware of any danger. He’d been wrapped up in his duties of late, and he’d been lulled into such a comfortable relationship with Tripoli, working here for a year with no major personal security problems, that his mind did not wander into the realm of threat perception.
As he turned into the Medina, behind him a pair of vans followed him closely.
Another car followed these two.
Oblivious to his long tail, Marris drove on, deeper into the shadows of the tight streets and alleyways of the Old City.
Many of the roads did not have street signs, but Renny knew where he was going. He loved the hustle and bustle of the Third World, the Arab world, and he’d found this little hidden courtyard café populated by locals and intrepid expats some months back while meeting with a shadowy contact. He’d returned every week or two since. He enjoyed the food, the atmosphere, the feeling that he could leave his office or his busy hotel suite full of computers and fax machines and sat phones and disappear into the belly of ancient North Africa in just a matter of minutes.
But he was wrong. He was hardly disappearing.
Dr. Renny Marris was a lead investigator for the United Nations, and he was a natural for the position, as he possessed a PhD in mechanical engineering and a reputation as being an ardent pacifist. Young Dr. Marris had served several stints working for aid agencies and human rights groups around the world, becoming an expert in land mine eradication in the 1980s. In the nineties he branched out into stopping the illegal trade of other forms of conventional weaponry. Now, into the second decade of the new century, he had been working in the field of antiproliferation of conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction for over two decades.
He’d spent his career in Ethiopia, the Congo, the Balkans, the former Soviet satellite states, Iraq, and Central America.
But these days, ground zero for a man in Marris’s field was Libya.
As the rebellion against the Gaddafi regime intensified, heavily guarded defense depots were abandoned by soldiers fleeing for their lives. Many of these soldiers took valuable weapons with them, and many of the rebels plundered the abandoned depots clean of the remaining war booty as soon as they could.
While the revolution was still in full swing, Dr. Marris and the UN arrived in-country to look for evidence of the chemical weapons Gaddafi was rumored to have produced and stockpiled over the years. But the Canadian inspector and his team found no evidence of a chemical program. This was good news, but it was followed quickly by bad news. Renny and his team heard rumors of the disappearance of conventional weapons in mind-boggling quantities. They began moving across the country, even as battles still raged, attempting to secure loose tank shells, land mines, artillery pieces, and shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles.
It was these SAMs that produced the biggest threat to the world at large. The missing high-tech Russian-made Igla-S shoulder-fired rocket (its NATO designation was the SA-24 Grinch) was a terrorist’s dream weapon; a single shooter with a single rocket and a single tube, a weapon system that weighed just over forty pounds, could take down a 747 full of passengers flying at ten thousand feet.
And hundreds of these weapon systems were missing around the nation.
Marris’s investigation had led to the capture of many of the lost missiles. Poorly organized gangs had taken some of them, and others were stolen by individuals who were caught when they tried to sell them on the crude black market that had developed. The new weapons bazaar of Tripoli was unorganized and insecure, and Marris and his team had scooped up tons of dangerous contraband with ease.
Other munitions were intercepted by Egyptian or Tunisian officials over the border or by U.S. or other Western powers on the open seas.
But a few months back all parties had been given a grim reminder of the high stakes of this game of cat and mouse. One of the dangerous Iglas-S systems had slipped through the grasp of all the entities trying to recover them. The SAM was bought and sold and transported, and then bought and sold and transported again. And then an Airbus A330 owned by Indonesia’s national carrier, Garuda Indonesia, had been shot down shortly after takeoff in Jakarta, killing all 266 aboard.
Dr. Renny Marris himself had arrived at the scene of the crash site within twenty-four hours, there to see if Libyan munitions were involved. He confirmed this by forensic testing on the impact point of the missile, and it was soon determined that the Indonesian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah had been responsible for the unspeakable crime.
That much of Gaddafi’s conventional weaponry had been stolen was not news around the world. At first there was panic around the globe with the news that up to twenty thousand surface-to-air missiles had been stolen and were on the loose. But as many of these and other arms had been recovered, the story died down.