state department, but he was in fact a member of CIA station Libya, which worked out of the embassy in the Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel. Like the People’s Militia lieutenant who’d greeted them, Richards looked too fresh by half. Probably his first overseas posting, Clark decided. Didn’t matter, really. As long as the man had the intel dump for them.
With the crunching of gears and a plume of diesel exhaust, the truck lurched forward and started moving.
“Sorry for the delay,” Richards said.
Clark shrugged, noting that the man hadn’t asked for names. Maybe a little sharper than I thought. He said, “I gather the colonel is less than enthusiastic about hosting us.”
“You gather correctly. Not sure of the hows, but the phones have been nuts for the past eight hours. Army’s got extra security posted around the hotel.”
This made sense. Whether a real threat or not, the Libyan government’s enhanced “protection” of the U.S. embassy was certainly a signal: The people of Libya were so unhappy about having Western soldiers on their soil that attacks on American assets were possible. It was crap, of course, but Muammar had to walk the fine line between being America’s newest ally in North Africa and presiding over a population that was still largely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and therefore unsympathetic to their oppressors, the United States and Israel.
“The joy of international politics,” Clark observed.
“Amen.”
“You got Arabic?”
“Yeah, passable. Getting better. Working on a level-three Rosetta Stone course.”
“Good. I’ll need you to stick around, translate for us.”
“You got it.”
“You have intel for us?”
Richards nodded, wiping his sweating forehead with a handkerchief. “They’ve got a command post set up on the top floor of an apartment building a block from the embassy. I’ll show you what we’ve got when we get there.”
“Fair enough,” Clark replied. “Any contact from inside the compound?”
“None.”
“How many hostages?”
“According to the Swedish foreign ministry, sixteen.”
“What’ve they done so far? The locals, I mean.”
“Nothing, as far as we can tell, beyond setting up a perimeter and keeping the civilians and reporters back.”
“The news broke?” Chavez asked.
Richards nodded. “Couple hours ago, while you were in the air. Sorry, forgot to tell you.”
Clark asked, “Utilities?”
“Water and electricity are still running to the compound.”
Cutting off these essentials was near the top of the to-do list for any hostage situation. This was important for two reasons: One, no matter how tough they were, a lack of amenities would begin to wear on the bad guys. And two, the resumption of water and electricity could be used during negotiations: Give us five hostages and we’ll turn your air-conditioning back on.
Here again, the Libyan government, having gotten the political “butt the fuck out,” was washing its hands of the situation. This could work in their favor, however. Unless the bad guys inside the embassy were complete idiots, they would have taken note of the utilities and perhaps made some guesses about what was happening outside, assuming that the security forces were either unprepared or waiting to cut the power in advance of an assault.
Maybe ... if, Clark thought. Hard to get into anyone’s head, let alone some dirtball who thinks it’s okay to take hostage a bunch of innocent civilians. It was just as likely the bad guys weren’t strategic thinkers at all and hadn’t given a second thought to the power-and-water question. Still, they’d been good enough to dispatch those Särskilda Skyddsgruppens, which at the very least suggested Rainbow was dealing with people with some training. Didn’t matter, really. There was none better than Rainbow, of that Clark was certain. Whatever the situation inside, it’d get sorted out—and most likely to the detriment of the bad guys.
The trip took twenty minutes. Clark spent most of it running scenarios in his head and watching the dusty, ochre-colored roads of Tripoli skim past the end of the tailgate. Finally the truck grumbled to a stop in an alley whose front and rear entrances were shaded by a pair of date palms. Lieutenant Masudi appeared at the rear and dropped the tailgate. Richards climbed out and led Clark and Stanley down the alley, while Chavez and the others gathered the gear and followed. Richards took them up two flights of stone stairs mounted on the stone wall’s exterior, then through a door into a half-finished apartment. Stacks of drywall lay against the wall along with five-gallon tubs of Sheetrock mud. Of the four walls, only two were finished, these painted a shade of sea-foam green that belonged in an episode of