by Andy McNab
'Then, in the mid-seventies, he disappeared into the desert, emerging months later with a manifesto for the Arab revolution, enshrined in something he called "The Third Universal Theory" – the Colonel's view on how to solve the ills of global society.
'The West looked on Gaddafi as a joke, with his loop shades and light blue suits, but it didn't appreciate – I guess none of us did – that the Third Universal Theory wasn't just for the Libyan masses; it was supposed to be a blueprint for everybody. Which was why, when the world didn't embrace his ideas, the Colonel decided to implement them by force.'
'And Mansour was the enforcer?'
'One of them, yes. This, to me, was what made his remark about Septimus Severus so intriguing. You see, Nick, Septimus was proclaimed emperor by his own troops after the assassination of the emperors Commodus and Pentinax in AD 193. Septimus was a soldier, but a soldier with a vision – he saw Leptis Magna as a potential rival to the power of Rome. He saw Africa as the empire's real centre of gravity.'
'Like Gaddafi and Libya?'
'Precisely. Gaddafi was the Great Leader; the man who would unite Africa against the corrupt capitalism of the West. And, despite the blue suits, for a while he really did give us a run for our money.'
'Sounds like you admire him.'
'Gaddafi?' Over the relentless pounding of the waves on the bottom of the boat I caught Lynn's laugh. 'I think Gaddafi is a joke. But when I returned to London I wrote a brief, which I wanted the suits to take very seriously indeed. I pointed out that the Colonel was underpinned by some extremely smart people – people like Mansour. Plotters. Cultured, intelligent Arabs. Not the nomadic ragheads of Whitehall myth and prejudice. You see, Nick, Septimus Severus really was a visionary, and his city, which he renovated following his victory against the Parthians in AD 203, became a lasting testament to his achievements. That's why I'd always wanted to visit Leptis Magna; and that's what I told Mansour.'
'And the brief?'
'I told them that we needed to pay heed to the lessons of history. Mansour's remark about Severus betrayed his ambitions. It told me he was intent on seeing through the Colonel's vision – and that we needed to pay a great deal of attention to that.'
'Pound to a penny the suits shelved it.'
Lynn turned to me and smiled. 'Of course. What did some upstart Classics scholar, a major with ten years' army experience, know? But within a year, Gaddafi's revolutionaries had taken over the Libyan People's Bureau in London, poor Yvonne Fletcher was dead, the Berlin night club had been blown up, the Americans had bombed Tripoli, and, and, and . . .'
He wasn't wrong. The rest was history.
71
I pretty much had the whole picture now. Lynn's brief encounter with Mansour saw them bonding over ancient history at a diplomatic party in Tripoli in 1984. Not long afterwards, Britain's relations with Libya broke down over the death of Yvonne Fletcher and the embassy was pulled out. Meanwhile, Mansour accelerated his plans to arm Britain's Public Enemy Number One, PIRA – only we got wind of it and decided to shut down the arms pipeline once and for all. That's when somebody must have dusted off Lynn's brief and decided to send him back in – undercover this time.
'What happened to Mansour after the Bahiti?'
'Gaddafi had more than $300 million personally invested in those two shipments. The Eksund's seizure by the French was bad enough; but when the Spanish took the Bahiti . . .' Lynn checked the handheld GPS again and adjusted the Predator's course.
'The Eksund and the Bahiti were public relations disasters. Not just for the IRA, but for the Libyans as well. For Gaddafi, the final straw was Enniskillen – the only time PIRA deliberately targeted civilians. He had set himself up as the liberator of the masses, and at Enniskillen it was the innocent who died – eleven of them, God rest their souls . . .'
Ahead, I could make out a faint glow on the horizon – the lights of the Sardinian coastline.
Lynn saw them too, made another course adjustment and settled back into his seat. 'To cut a long story short, Nick, the Colonel threw Mansour into prison and he sat there under lock and key for the next five years. Not a particularly good time for him, no doubt, but it did tell us one very useful thing – that he had nothing to do with Lockerbie. In fact, prison, in a sense, was Mansour's saving grace.'
'What do you mean?'
'Because we knew he was clean, because he had to have been out of the loop over Lockerbie, we agreed to accept Mansour as an emissary when the Colonel decided in the late nineties he'd had enough of international sanctions. In 2001, Mansour flew to London on Gaddafi's orders and met with his counterparts in the Firm and the Agency.
'Because of what happened in '87, I obviously couldn't meet him personally, but I was there, in the background. By this time, the Colonel had already handed over the Lockerbie suspects for trial, enabling the UN-imposed sanctions on Libya to be lifted. But we wanted to take things further, especially after 9/11, by getting Libya to renounce its WMD and ballistic missile programmes.
'Unfortunately, the temptations of London proved too much for our old friend Mansour and he was covertly photographed in his London hotel suite with a prostitute. The Americans were all for hanging him out to dry, and because of his role in the PIRA shipments, there were a good many people on our side of the pond who'd have happily gone along with them.'
The look on Lynn's face in the reflection of the windscreen gave him away and in that instant the last remaining piece of the puzzle fell into place.
'You saved his arse?'
In his twisted, public-school view of the world, Lynn had believed that he owed Mansour one. Never mind that the Libyan had overseen shipments of weapons to the Republic. Never mind that Mansour was indirectly responsible for the death of God knows how many British troops – mates I'd served with and Lynn, too, in all probability.
This was why I hated spooks. Now I was lumbered with one that had gone soft in the head. And in a country where every pair of eyes would be on us and, if we put a foot wrong, we'd be dead.
'You still haven't answered the question. How are we going to find Mansour?'
'Oh, that's the easy bit. When we were monitoring him back in the eighties he showed himself to be a bit of a creature of habit. There was a shisha shop – a place where Mansour always used to go to smoke, day in and day out – in the Medina, the old walled city. It was called Osman's. His mosque was nearby. That's where we need to start looking.'
'He may not be sitting there with a welcome sign,' I said. 'If he's still a player, he might well disappear for the next couple of days – or be completely swamped by security.'
72
Cagliari in the cold drizzle of a winter morning was a shit-hole – the hangover after the glittering Italian party the night before. We approached the harbour just before first light. A blue and white ferry, long in need of a lick of paint, blew its foghorn mournfully as we threaded our way through a set of rusty marker buoys towards the marina. The town loomed above us: banks of nondescript, colourless apartment buildings stared back at me from a hillside devoid of greenery except for a few moth-eaten palm trees.
'What do you mean? Why would Mansour suddenly be in the limelight?'
I told him what I'd read at the café. The British Foreign Secretary was hitting Tripoli either today or tomorrow, so if Mansour was still the man Gaddafi turned to when he wanted somebody to talk turkey with the Brits, our man was going to be down at the embassy nibbling at the vol-au-vents, not toking away in the shisha bar and waiting to invite us home.
The Secretary of State's visit couldn't have come at a worse time. However much 'liberalizing' had been going on in Libya in recent years, Colonel G would want to ensure that nothing marred the proceedings – which meant additional security and lots of it: around state buildings, embassies and on the streets themselves.
When I said as much to Lynn he just smiled. 'It's all in the lap of the gods, Nick. Why worry about what we can't change?'
Ahead of us lay a grey
, businesslike harbour. A few fishing boats mingled with some of the rich boys' toys we'd seen in Italy. Maybe I was seeing Cagliari in the wrong light or through the wrong lens – blurred by the single hour's sleep I'd managed to grab during the night – but if I'd come here on a Club 18-30, I'd have asked for my money back.
I left Lynn to guide the Predator towards the filling station and went below to check on Gary and Electra.
I found her lying on the bunk in her bra and panties. She stretched like a cat and purred at me. 'Where are we?'
She knelt on the bunk and squinted outside.
I don't suppose Cagliari had ever loomed large on her list of Mediterranean must-see venues – unless, of course, its millionaire count was more substantial than first impressions suggested. A bouquet of unpleasant smells wafted in through the port hole. She shut it and lay back down on the bed.
'We'll be refuelling for an hour or so, then we'll be on our way again.' I turned to go.
'Hey, don't go . . .' She was getting more catlike by the minute. I guess that wherever you threw her, she'd land on her feet. 'Let me talk to you for a moment . . .'
I paused by the door and turned to face her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her thighs spread a little further than would be considered ladylike down at the Rose and Crown, let alone the Swiss finishing school her parents had probably sent her to. I could see she was thinking hard, preparing her words carefully.
'Listen. I don't know who you are and I don't really care. Whatever you want, it has nothing to do with me. Take the boat, do what you want to that arsehole. He's nothing to me. Just let me off here and I promise I won't say anything to anybody.' She let her thighs wander another inch or two apart. 'Deal?'
'Why should I trust you?'
'Because I'm good to people I like. Really good . . .'
'Big day out, I'm sure.' I turned back towards the door.
'I know some pretty powerful people.'
'Yeah? What are you doing with a big fat cunt like Gary then?'
The doe-eyed look vanished. The look she gave me now was meant to kill.
I switched off the light and closed the door.
I dragged Gary blinking into the galley and told him he could have a coffee and some toast for breakfast if he promised to be a good boy and help us out.
He nodded meekly. 'Sure. 'Course, mate. Anything. What do you want me to do?'
'Get ready with that credit card.'
As soon as he got dressed, I told him to get on deck, and, at the appropriate moment, help us to tie up alongside the refuelling station. I reminded him that I would be with him every step of the way and that I was still carrying a twelve-inch kitchen knife.
73
An hour later, we were hurtling southeast across the grey waters of the Med. Lynn had been monitoring Sky News on the Predator's flatscreen. They didn't say precisely when the Foreign Secretary was due to land, and they probably didn't know; it wasn't a full-blown state visit. But I knew the place would have been put on high alert: Gaddafi wouldn't want his admission to the Good Lads' Club to be screwed up.
Lynn had also had his calculator out. Judging by our timings over the previous leg, he reckoned that if we throttled back to twenty knots we'd be able to conserve enough diesel to enter Libyan waters with fuel to spare. Barring unforeseen incidents, it would take us another fourteen hours; we'd be in position, ready to deploy the tender and go ashore, shortly before midnight.
Along the way, we'd need to find somewhere to dump our two companions. Looking at the charts, we had a number of choices.
The island of Pantelleria was around 200 miles away as the crow flew. There was also Cap Bon, a deserted peninsula on the east coast of Tunisia. Or the west coast of Sicily.
But Lampedusa got my vote.
The tiny Italian island was famous for the moment when, in a fit of serious pique, Gaddafi had lobbed a Scud at it. The fact that nobody in NATO noticed until some hill farmers rang in to say that their goats had been spontaneously kebabed told me that by the time Gary and Electra found their way to whatever civilization existed there, we'd be long gone – and they'd be none the wiser about our destination.
Gary had already let it be known with a nudge and a wink that everything was cool by him. So was the fact that we were making our way towards the Adriatic, epicentre of drug-smuggling operations in the Med. He liked a bit of coke himself, he told me, and, since the boat wasn't his, good luck to us.
He reminded me about his wife and kids back in Barking and promised he wouldn't give us any trouble. I told him I'd bear that in mind.
With Gary stowed safely below deck, I ordered Lynn to get his head down. Given that it was daylight and I could navigate my way around a handheld GPS, I reassured him I could handle the boat.
'Just got to steer it, yeah?'
Five hours into the second leg, the sun came out. We passed a few tankers steaming between Tunis and Sicily, but otherwise the sea was calm and empty. From the driver's seat, I gazed past the bow of the Predator towards the North African coastline. The last time I had been in these waters had been in 2001, less than two months after 9/11.
I'd come ashore on the Algerian coast with two Egyptian nationals, deniable operators like me, to bring back the head of a forty-eight-year-old Algerian, Adel Kader Zeralda, owner of a chain of supermarkets and a domestic fuel company based in Oran. Why he needed to die, I didn't have a clue. It was a reasonable bet that with over 350 Algerian Al-Qaeda extremists operating around the globe Zeralda was up to his neck in it, but I wasn't going to lie awake worrying about that. All I cared about was carrying out the job correctly and on time. My American employers insisted I brought back his head. They were going to show it to some of his relatives to encourage a bit of entente cordiale.
The trick this time was much the same, to get in and get out, and fast. If we could track down Mansour without being grabbed ourselves, put the links in place between the Bahiti, the bomb-maker and Leptis, we'd know who was trying to drop us, and why.
We were still around fifteen miles from Lampedusa when, with darkness falling, we motored into a fog-bank. Our strobe navigation lights cast weird reflections off the mist and on the black surface of the water as the fog became progressively thicker. Lynn throttled back. The charts showed rocks on the run-in to the island. We couldn't take any chances.
We were both peering through the windshield when a beeping noise sparked up from the dashboard.
I looked at Lynn. 'What is it?'
'Proximity warning. Radar's tagged something. It's picking up a return off the port bow.' He stared at the radar screen for a second or two. 'To be absolutely honest, Nick, I don't really know what it is.'
'How far away is it?'
'Less than a mile. And closing.'
74
It was a fishing boat, but like nothing you'd find in Grimsby.
It looked as if she'd been built at the tail end of the nineteenth century – a hulk of a vessel, as big as the Predator, but streaked with rust and grime and with thick black smoke belching from a battered stack. As we drew closer, a breeze parted the mist and we got our first half-decent view of it. She had a bit of a list, about fifteen degrees to starboard, but that wasn't too surprising – there were around 150 people leaning over the rail, staring at us.
She was only a couple of hundred metres away, but in the diminishing light it was difficult – even through the binos – to make out the faded writing on her bow. The clues to her origin and purpose were a green flag, riddled with holes, that was flying from her stern mast and the people hanging off her side: I'd seen pictures of survivors from Belsen and Auschwitz who looked better fed.
