by Andy McNab
The guard turned his attention to us.
Our fate rested in the hands of a man who'd have slit his own mother's throat twenty years ago on the say-so of the Great Leader with the big lapels.
97
I kept my hands on the wheel so the guard could see them and so I could turn the wheel as soon as this went noisy. The automatic gearbox would do the work for me. All I had to do was shift my foot off the brake and onto the gas. The Makarov was still where I needed it – cold comfort in a rapidly worsening situation.
The guard swaggered up to the Audi and tapped the glass with the muzzle of his AK.
Mansour powered down his window. Warm, dust-laden air blew into the car as he beckoned the guard to his side of the wagon.
The guard bent down to give us a good look and I saw the pips on his shoulders. I wasn't hot on Libyan rank insignia, but I reckoned he was a captain or a major. His face was heavily pockmarked. A layer of black stubble showed beneath the ball cap. He stared at us over the top of his Aviators before finally addressing Mansour.
'Taruh fein?' Not a hint of deference; just a whole lot of suspicion.
I caught the word Ajdabiya in Mansour's reply.
There was another burst of questioning and I glanced in the mirror at Lynn. I didn't like the way this was going. By the look on his face, he didn't much either.
I ran my right hand down the side of the wheel so it was nearer the weapon.
The guard barked again and Mansour reached slowly into his inside pocket.
The guard's head moved a fraction; I was pretty sure the eyes behind the Aviators were looking straight at me. I smiled back.
Mansour handed over a small green carnet. More questions, more suspicion. The guard looked from me to Lynn, then switched his attention to Mansour's little green identity card.
I swore I heard the tick of the electronic clock on the Q7's dashboard as the officer scrutinized each line of Mansour's ID.
He glanced at the card, then at Mansour's face. Suddenly he barked at us, using a different tone altogether: 'Yallah, yallah, yallah.'
The officer stepped back. I had no idea what was going on. Was he going for his weapon?
My hand moved towards the Makarov. I'd drop the guard before he could fire and then get my foot down.
Mansour realized what was going through my mind. He held his hand flat below the level of the window, where the guard couldn't see what he was doing. He was signalling for me to cool it. 'They're letting us through.'
The guard pressed Mansour's identity card back into his outstretched hand.
'Drive.'
I didn't need to be told twice. I edged past the vehicle in front.
More shouting. Lots of excitement. The sentry on the barrier snapped a smartish-looking salute as we passed beneath it.
Mansour hit the button and his window slid upwards.
I blipped the accelerator and the Audi's big engine purred as we headed back out onto the open road.
I checked the mirror, glancing back every so often as the checkpoint receded into the distance. Nobody was following us. It soon disappeared in a cloud of dust.
I turned to Mansour. 'What happened?'
The big, satisfied grin had found its way back onto the cat's face. 'Gaddafi still uses many Russian advisers. There are Russians everywhere in this country. If there is one thing that terrifies the Kata'eb Al-Amn as much as the Great Guide himself, it's the Russians he surrounds himself with. I got the idea from our conversation earlier.'
The relief in the car was so great I could taste it.
I told Mansour I'd heard him mention our destination: Ajdabiya.
'There's an oil terminal in Ajdabiya that's run by a big Russian petroleum company. I told the officer we were going there. Why else would I have two white faces with me?'
Lynn placed his hand on the Libyan's shoulder. He spoke softly – and with a degree of approval that left me feeling uncomfortable. 'Stroke of genius, Mansour. Well done.'
We drove on in silence. As we passed the town of Al-Khoms, I noticed a sign in English, pointing the way to Leptis just a few kilometres to our left. I watched Lynn's reaction in the mirror. Needless to say, he knew exactly where we were. I studied his eyes as the sign slid past; he was like a kid catching sight of a disappearing ice-cream van.
At Misrata, we followed the road south for fifty kilometres, then took a right-hand fork and headed out into the Sahara. As we left the coast behind, the scrub became patchier and all traces of civilization gradually disappeared, leaving us with an endless flat landscape and a horizon that merged with the heat haze. The dark strip of tarmac stretched endlessly ahead of us, uninterrupted except for the odd rusting truck hurtling past in the opposite direction.
I'd crossed a lot of deserts, but nothing quite matched the desolation and loneliness of this particular stretch of the Sahara.
98
Several hours later we were down to a quarter of a tank. According to the sat nav there was a petrol station thirty-nine Ks ahead.
Mansour announced that our problems were going to start soon after it. The last time he'd driven this way, he'd encountered several roadblocks along one twenty-kilometre stretch. Rumours were rife of Russians buying huge tracts of coastline on which to build holiday homes. The police had been brought in to safeguard construction traffic and staff.
Mansour knew a way around the roadblocks. 'We can leave the road about ten kilometres after the filling station and use the old nomads' tracks. The vehicle can handle it.'
He turned in his seat. 'Al-Inn, I will show you something many, many times better than Leptis Magna. I found the bust of Septimus Severus very close to where we turn off.'
'How can you possibly say that?'
'You will see for yourself. Only a handful of people know about this place. I believe it to be the emperor's winter palace.'
I found myself tuning in. I now knew the value that antiquities could command on the black market. With a couple of busts in the boot, I could afford to disappear off the face of the earth.
As a boy, Mansour had been passed down stories from nomadic traders of ruins in the desert, north of Al-Waddan territory.
The traders had described the ruins as 'Roumi' – Roman – but there were many strange sights in the Sahara: from the relics of ancient caravanserais – stop-off points for travellers plying the trans-Sahara trade routes – to downed aircraft from the Second World War, some still with the mummified remains of their crews in their seats.
The stories were part of the myth and folklore of the desert. Nobody in Waddan paid them much attention.
But the possibility of a long-lost Roman site wouldn't release its grip on the young Mansour's imagination. He became obsessed with the idea of finding it.
Years later, he was given a helping hand – from Gaddafi, of all people.
More than ten years after graduating from the University of Tripoli, when he was an ambitious young army major, he was sent into the desert to help train the 'freedom fighters'.
Collating information on all the possible locations for the lost site, Mansour constructed a grid. Whenever he could, he took off in a jeep and worked his way across it.
One day, following a particularly violent sandstorm, he fell in with a band of Berber camel-herders who told him that they had recently passed some partially revealed ruins on the edge of a wadi around ten kilometres from the Misrata–Waddan road.
Following their directions, Mansour came across some half-buried columns. Then he found pieces of pottery and mosaic. For several weeks he excavated what he could, but in the wake of the US raids on Tripoli, the decision was taken to shift the 'freedom fighters' to camps further south.
Before he deployed with them, Mansour carefully triangulated the location of his find against some local landmarks, did what he could to conceal what he had uncovered, and promised himself that one day he'd be back. In the meantime, he told no one.
After his release from prison, he scrutinized archaeo
logical notices for signs that his discovery had been compromised. It hadn't.
Recently he'd decided to return to the site and start excavating again. When he did, he realized that his discovery was even more significant than he'd first imagined.
To begin with, the complex was big. It comprised the ruins of a palace, a number of state rooms, a temple and a library. It had housed a dignitary of high rank.
I checked the sat nav. Another ten kilometres and we'd reach the petrol station. Good timing. From the rising note of excitement in Mansour's voice, I got the sense we were heading for the big reveal.
'I found inscriptions to a woman – a woman called Fulvia Pia, Al-Inn. Fulvia Pia . . .'
Lynn smiled. 'The mother of Septimus Severus.' He leant towards me. 'She was Roman. His father was of Berber descent . . .'
Mansour broke through into what looked like an entranceway to an underground chamber. It turned out to be the opening of a tunnel. Imperial palaces employed them so that slaves could move around the complex without being seen by the emperor and his family.
'The bust had been wrapped in a leather cloth and placed in the tunnel, I believe, to conceal it from Berber raiders. I had found the remains of the palace of Rome's African emperor, Al-Inn.'
99
Twenty minutes after we filled the Q7 with fuel, costing all of about $8, Mansour's site loomed up on the sat nav, ten kilometres from the main road.
I turned off the highway. The terrain changed from flat as a billiard-table to rocky and undulating. After just ten minutes, the ground fell away dramatically and we drove down into a wadi. I swerved to miss a rock the size of a basketball and didn't see the pothole waiting to swallow the nearside tyre.
The Audi lurched and I heard the axle crunch. I put my foot down and powered out of it, but, with the car rearing, gave another huge boulder a glancing blow. As we grounded again the Q7's nose dipped and slewed. I braked to a halt.
'We've blown a tyre.'
I switched off the engine and got out. Our only piece of good luck was that the edge of the wadi kept the Audi below the level of the horizon, in case anyone happened to be playing I-spy from the road.
I opened the boot and the doors to allow what little breeze there was to blow through the car. 'You two need to get out while I jack it up.'
I took the .38 from Lynn. I didn't want him to hand it to Mansour on a plate while I changed the tyre.
The Libyan fucked around in the boot for a moment or two and came up with a foam-filled toolkit with cut-outs for the adjustable spanner, the screwdriver, the torch . . . all the things you'd need if you were unlucky enough to break down in the middle of nowhere.
'No point us getting in your way,' he said cheerfully. 'We might as well stretch our legs . . .'
They moved further down the wadi towards the clearly visible foundations of a house.
100
I found the hole in the tyre as I loosened the first nut. It was small, but deep. I eased the wheel off and struggled to replace it with the spare. It took a long, hot twenty minutes. I was soaked in sweat by the time I'd finished, and gagging for a drink.
I heaved the old wheel round to the boot. Lynn had stashed the water next to a large clear plastic box of tiny scrapers and trowels and stuff that the people on Time Team use to dig up Viking shit. Like the Q7 tools they each had their own little moulded spaces.
Voices drifted up from the wadi as I ripped the top off one of the bottles and got a litre or so down my neck. I peered around the back of the 4x4 and saw the two of them sitting on what remained of a wall. Mansour was waving his arms enthusiastically, pointing out various features of the site. Even at this distance I could see that Lynn was glowing with pleasure.
As I heaved the wheel aboard, I glanced again at Mansour's Time Team kit. Something wasn't quite right. A little voice started screaming in my head. I lifted the lid and took a closer look.
There was an empty 3cm by 10cm recess in the top right-hand corner. A Nokia car-charger sat snugly in the space alongside it.
Fuck . . .
He had a back-up mobile for emergencies. I didn't want him to know that I knew – not yet, anyway. I called Lynn up from the wadi. He joined me, still looking like his head was somewhere in ancient Rome.
'Has he been on his own at all while you've been down there?'
'Why?'
'Has he?'
'Yes . . . He needed to relieve himself. He went round the corner, but not for long.'
I showed him the empty space next to the charger. 'Did he have long enough to make a call?'
'Maybe, but I would have heard him.'
'A text, maybe?'
'There can't be a signal out here.'
'Wrong, mate.'
I showed him the phone I'd taken from Mansour's bedroom. Three bars registered on the left-hand side of the screen – a nice, fat signal.
'You can pick up a signal in the depths of fucking Afghanistan. Polar bears can get a fucking signal . . .'
'Well, maybe . . .'
Confronted by some old bricks, a few pillars, some shattered pieces of pottery and a two-thousand-year-old mystery, Lynn had abandoned any idea that Mansour might represent a threat – and had taken his eye off the ball.
'He's giving us the fucking run-around. That business about him trying to call you is bullshit. He's bullshitting about the Russians, too, and all this antiquities trading. And as for all his old enemies being his new best friends . . .'
Lynn's face flushed a deep shade of red. 'You know what, Nick? All your suspicions of Mansour are born of your myriad prejudices. They have a term for it; they call it paranoid projection. Any half-decent psychologist will tell you all about it if ever you have the good sense to go and see one.'
He paused for a moment, checking that Mansour was still out of earshot. 'There is no mobile phone, Nick. If Mansour had been bullshitting, there would have been nothing to see out here – no ruins, no imperial palace. We passed through that checkpoint because he bluffed it with the Kata'eb Al-Amn. I know. I listened to every word. What he told us about the Russians exactly matched what he told the officer at the checkpoint. He is trying to help us and I'm damned if I'm going to let you ruin everything with your paranoid delusions.'
He strode off downhill to collect his mate.
I closed the tailgate and jumped back behind the wheel. I signalled I was ready to leave by firing up the engine.
When Mansour appeared, he beamed at me like a cat that had swallowed not just the cream, but a whole fucking dairy farm.
He opened the door, ready to hoist himself into the passenger seat. I was tempted to grab him, spin him round and frisk him to within an inch of his life. But he wouldn't still have it on him. He was too clever for that. And besides, I knew I couldn't risk alienating him any more than I had already; he was the only one who could identify the Palestinian's house.
I put my foot down and we accelerated away in a shower of grit. Paranoid projection, my arse. I wasn't the one who needed the shrink here.
101
As the Audi bounced back onto tarmac I checked the sat nav. Ajdabiya was a little under 300 kilometres away – less than two hours.
