The long convoy was passing vacant lots in a deserted neighborhood.
Where were they going?
He phoned the NTC again but got no answer.
Now on edge, he continued to look out the window and chambered a round in his assault rifle.
Cynthia was still deeply asleep. Malko realized he couldn’t count on her until morning.
There was no point in alerting Tombstone about the delay. Nothing serious was likely to happen between now and daybreak, and the base’s guard had been reinforced in case their adversaries decided to launch an attack.
Malko walked out onto the lawn and contemplated the starry sky. As usual, bursts of AK-47 gunfire crackled in the distance. These were fired by rebels celebrating their victory over Qaddafi, whose body lay some four hundred miles away in Misrata.
After a while, Malko went back into the house, then to his bedroom. When he lay down on the bed, Cynthia didn’t even stir.
The convoy turned left and entered a walled compound.
General Younes could see parked vehicles and illuminated buildings: a militia base. His driver stopped, and the car was immediately surrounded by a dozen fierce-looking thwars. One opened the door on the general’s side; two others opened the rear doors.
“Give me your weapons,” snapped the first man.
A brief, tense silence followed. General Younes had his finger on his AK-47’s trigger, but another AK was aimed at his belly. Controlling his fury, he gave the man his assault rifle.
The thwar pointed at Younes’s belt.
“The pistol, too.”
Younes took his 9 mm Makarov automatic from its holster and handed it over, holding it by the barrel. The two colonels in the back of the car also surrendered their weapons without resistance. The balance of power wasn’t in their favor.
After disarming Younes’s party, the bearded rebels stood around the car in complete silence.
Then a new man appeared, a thwar in a combat uniform with a pistol on his hip. To the driver he said:
“Get out. We don’t need you anymore.”
When the driver didn’t react, the man grabbed his arm and yanked him out of the car. A couple of thwars immediately surrounded him and dragged him off into the darkness.
A few seconds later, Younes was startled by the sound of three shots from the direction where his driver had been taken. A rebel was now sitting behind the wheel of the car.
“What’s going on?” Younes asked him.
“I don’t know,” said the man, starting the engine.
Younes knew that something very serious was afoot. After all, he was the NTC chief of staff, and these militiamen should be obeying him.
They drove out of the camp and headed east on an empty road. The general’s car was surrounded by a dozen armed pickups.
Trailing clouds of dust, they drove fast for about half an hour, then stopped in a stretch of empty, stony desert. The pickups pulled up in a semicircle around Younes’s car. The rebel driver said:
“Get out, all of you.”
The three officers obeyed. They were in the middle of nowhere, without a living soul in sight. Suddenly a Mercedes appeared, its doors adorned with the black, red, and green Libyan flag. It stopped, and a man got out. He was wearing a turban and a long white dishdasha, had a full black beard, and carried a folding AK-47. He walked up to the general and the two colonels.
Younes immediately recognized Abu Bukatalla. In a way, he was almost relieved. At last he was going to find out what was going on. Abu Bukatalla was the head of one of the NTC militias, so he was theoretically under Younes’s command.
“Why was I brought here, and why was I disarmed?” Younes asked angrily. “Give me my pistol back. And where is my driver?”
The Islamist looked at him coldly.
“Your driver has been executed for the crimes he committed when he was interrogating our brothers in Abu Salim prison, on your orders.” That was the biggest prison in Tripoli, which Qaddafi had filled with political prisoners.
Enraged, General Younes said:
“I’ve never been involved with the prison! I was the minister of defense!”
“Exactly. The prison was under you. You’re the person who ordered twelve hundred prisoners executed, to please old ‘Shafshufa.’ Don’t you remember?”
“I had nothing to do with that! I discussed it with NTC President Mustafa Abdel-Jalil before he gave me command of the liberation troops. I demand that you take me to him immediately.”
Abu Bukatalla looked at Younes and said, “He’s the person who told me to bring you here, judge you for your crimes, and execute you.”
The general felt the blood draining from his face.
He understood.
“If you kill me, you’ll pay for it in blood,” he said. “My tribe is powerful and will avenge me.”
Abu Bukatalla raised his right index finger to the sky.
“No one is more powerful than Allah the all-powerful and the all-merciful,” he said sententiously. “You’re nothing but a dog and a criminal. You killed your brothers, and you must die.”
With that, he calmly raised his AK-47 and fired three-shot bursts, one at each prisoner.
General Younes and the two colonels crumpled in the dust. The militia leader turned to his men and said:
“Take their bodies to the ravine and burn them.”
The thwars ran up and grabbed the corpses. But they were a little taken aback just the same. Under Islam, the dead are respected and bodies are never burned.
It is haram. A sin.
Day was breaking.
The big farm northeast of Benghazi buzzed with feverish activity. The property, which belonged to a member of the Obeidi tribe, was the place where the group based its militia and stockpiled its weapons. Some fifteen armed pickup trucks were parked near the building that served as its headquarters.
Inside, the mood was unusually tense, as a half dozen men worked their phones trying to locate General Younes. An eminent member of the tribe, he’d been supposed to arrive the previous evening with a guest whose identity they didn’t know, and spend the night at the base, protected by the tribe’s fighters.
But they had waited all night, in vain. Younes had given no sign of life and wasn’t answering his phone.
A tribesman hung up his cell phone and said:
“I just talked to Ra’s Lanuf. The general left there yesterday around four in the afternoon with a small escort: a driver and two colonels from his general staff.”
Another man spoke up:
“The NTC at Benghazi claims they’re in the dark about this. President Abdel-Jalil is in Tripoli. It seems they got a phone call from the general last night saying he’d been intercepted by an armed group, but the man who took the call isn’t there this morning.”
The mood abruptly became more somber. Seated on a carpet on the ground, Fathi and Omar, two of Younes’s nephews, felt a wave of anxiety.
“We have to investigate in town,” said Fathi. “Somebody might have noticed something. Start with the Brega highway; he had to have driven that way. Question everybody, and especially at the checkpoints. Some of them are manned by people of the tribe.”
That the general had probably been intercepted by armed men was a very bad sign. In an attempt to ward off fate, some of the tribesmen knelt and began to pray.
Ibrahim al-Senussi had fallen asleep very late, wracked with anxiety. The moment he woke up, he rushed to the terrace, pulled out his Thuraya, and dialed General Younes’s number.
Without success.
He was feeling even more worried when he headed back downstairs and bumped into the young Islamist who brought him mint tea, water, and dates every morning. Though the young man’s babyish face showed only the beginnings of a beard, he already had the fierce gaze of a God-crazed fanatic. Hand on his heart, he greeted al-Senussi politely:
“Salaam alaikum. I have a message for you.”
“Alaikum salaam,” said al-Senussi. “Is i
t from General Younes?”
“No, it’s from Abu Bukatalla. He is coming to visit you soon. Inshallah, he will have important news for you.”
Al-Senussi immediately relaxed. At last he would learn what had happened to General Younes. His tea and dates suddenly seemed to taste better.
Abd al-Raziq, Younes’s favorite nephew, was tracking his uncle like a bloodhound. His investigation began at the Brega highway checkpoint south of Benghazi, the last one before reaching the city. It was manned by a member of the Watani tribe, and he gave al-Raziq his first lead. Yes, he said, a large convoy had passed the checkpoint: about twenty heavily armed pickups surrounding a Jeep Cherokee with the black, red, and green flag on its sides. The Watani man hadn’t been able to see who was inside.
“Do you know who those people were?” asked al-Raziq.
“Yes. Emir Abu Bukatalla’s brigade.”
Al-Raziq’s heart sank. They were his uncle’s worst enemy.
“Where were they going?”
“Toward town.”
Al-Raziq raced to Abu Bukatalla’s old militia headquarters but found it deserted, its buildings ransacked and abandoned, and strewn with empty weapons crates.
On a hunch, he drove out on the Brega highway, stopping occasionally to ask questions at shops that were still open. From them, he learned that the convoy had gone around the city on one of the ring roads and then disappeared. No one had seen it travel beyond a certain intersection.
So they must have taken that fork, onto a dirt road leading east. There was no one left to question; they were now in open desert. Using his cell phone, al-Raziq roused a few loyalists, increasing his party’s size to a dozen pickups and SUVs full of armed men.
The road wandered through the desert. Al-Raziq spotted a nomad camp and sent someone for information. The man came back a few moments later.
“They say they heard a convoy last night,” he said, “but they don’t know who it was.”
There was nothing to do but follow the track as it snaked over the desert vastness. They were already about ten miles past Benghazi’s Fifth Ring Road, and the track just went deeper into the desert without leading to a town or village.
Al-Raziq’s group drove on until they came to a rise where the track petered out amid a jumble of sand dunes. On the ground, he could make out many tire tracks. A convoy had passed through here. What had they been doing in this desert dead end?
A fighter perched on top of one of the pickups said he could see something, a dark mound in a ravine.
Al-Raziq got out, his throat tight. He already knew what he was going to find.
The three bodies were unrecognizable, reduced to a charred black mass. Someone must have poured at least a jerry can of gasoline over them. It was impossible to tell how they died.
His heart as hard as flint, al-Raziq ordered a tarp brought and the remains of the three respectfully wrapped in it.
Given the state of the bodies, there was no way to positively identify them, but al-Raziq was sure they were his uncle and the two colonels. If he hadn’t been so relentless in his search, they might have lain out here for weeks, and General Younes’s fate would have remained a mystery. One often came across bodies of men executed in out-of-the-way places, without ever knowing what had happened. In these troubled times, there was no investigation. The corpses were simply buried.
Their grieving hearts full of hate, the men knelt on the stony ground, faced Mecca, and implored God Almighty to care for his dead servants.
There were now two things to be done: give these martyrs a decent burial, and avenge them.
Bursts of AK fire rang out, as his tribesmen gave General Younes a final salute.
By common accord, the convoy roared back toward town in a cloud of dust. Nobody said a word. The powerful Obeidi tribe had never been so humiliated.
This would be paid for in blood.
James Tuk, the State Department’s representative in Benghazi, was in an office at NTC headquarters, a white, one-story building topped by the flag of the new Libya. He was discussing the possibility of releasing Libyan funds frozen in the United States.
Just then, several long bursts of AK-47 fire rattled outside and shattered several windows, including the one in the office where Tuk was speaking. He bravely ran to the window, to see that some twenty armed men had gotten out of their vehicles and were surrounding the building.
One of the men stepped forward and shouted something.
“He wants to talk to someone in charge,” said Tuk, who understood Arabic.
They waited. A few more AK bursts rang out, chipping the stone facade. Quaking with fear, the council’s general secretary went out to talk with the assailants. Their conversation was brief, and when the official was back inside, his colleagues immediately gathered around.
“They say that General Younes has been assassinated with the council’s connivance,” he managed to say. “I told them we didn’t know anything about it, but they don’t believe me.”
“Do you think it’s true?” asked the American dubiously.
Rumors travel fast in Libya.
“They offered to show me his body,” said the official. “It’s in one of the cars, along with two other men they found at the same time.”
Tuk could hardly contain himself.
“I don’t think this is a time to be talking finances,” he said, apologizing to his interlocutor. “I have to report to my department.”
The main supporter of American policy in Libya had just died.
That was very bad news.
From the window of his room overlooking al-Sharif, Ibrahim al-Senussi could see a dozen pickups blocking the narrow street. Armed with 23 mm cannons and full of men in a variety of outfits, they were parked right across from his house.
When he went downstairs, al-Senussi found the young Islamist coming to fetch him.
“The emir has arrived,” he announced.
Abu Bukatalla was sitting down, leaning against some cushions. He had a folding AK-47 next to him and was drinking a glass of tea. He stood up to embrace al-Senussi, and the two men sat.
Al-Senussi immediately asked:
“Do you know where General Younes is?”
“I have bad news, brother,” said the takfiri somberly.
“Has something happened to him?”
“No. When he learned that Qaddafi was dead, he left Ra’s Lanuf and fled to the southwest, to Tuareg country.”
Al-Senussi felt as if the sky had fallen on his head.
“Why would he do that?” he asked, his voice shaky.
“The NTC was secretly investigating him because he was suspected of maintaining relations with the other side. Younes had refused to launch certain offensives. He’d been summoned to Benghazi to explain himself, and he got frightened. I’m afraid we will never see him again. He is a traitor who hoped the situation would turn around. With Qaddafi dead, that’s impossible.”
Al-Senussi was crushed. General Younes was to be his major ally. He didn’t know what to say.
“You should continue your consultations,” said Abu Bukatalla, breaking the silence. “I’m sure there are other people you can talk to, likely supporters.”
“Er, yes, of course,” al-Senussi stammered, his mind in a whirl.
“You just need to adjust your plans,” said the takfiri smoothly. “I have a few things to take care of, and I will be away for a day or two. When I get back, we’ll see where we stand. I’m sure you’ll find other allies to connect with.”
Abu Bukatalla finished his tea and chewed a date, spitting out its pit. He stood, al-Senussi followed suit, and the two men embraced.
The Islamist chief left, escorted by four heavily armed militiamen. Moments later, the rumble of pickup truck engines broke the silence in the street, whose shops were still closed.
Feeling devastated, al-Senussi went back to his room. He didn’t know what course to take.
General Younes was missing, but his Obeidi tribe was still on
e of the most powerful in eastern Libya. Its support would carry considerable political weight. Al-Senussi was also due to meet with members of the National Transitional Council. They didn’t directly control any militias but were influential because of their political contacts abroad. The Western world had anointed the NTC as the leader of the new Libya, while realizing it was only a paper tiger.
The problem was, they didn’t know about al-Senussi’s presence in Benghazi. How would they view a secret trip organized under the auspices of a takfiri and British intelligence?
Al-Senussi was dying to call Cynthia to share his thinking, but he didn’t know where she was.
Ted knocked at Malko’s bedroom door. Cynthia was still asleep.
“I have a message for you,” shouted the American. “You’re to call Cairo.”
Malko, who had just finished showering, took his satellite phone and went out on the lawn. The sky was still bright. Jerry Tombstone picked up on the first ring.
“I have some bad news,” he drawled. “General Younes has been killed. The State Department just told me.”
“Who did it?”
“We don’t know yet, but probably the Islamists. I also spoke with the NTC president, who is in Tripoli. He hadn’t even heard the news.”
“So what does this mean?” asked Malko.
“That the next person on the list is our friend Ibrahim. Abu Bukatalla had him come to Benghazi as a way of luring Younes out into the open. Now that al-Senussi’s of no further use, he’ll be the next to go.”
“You think so?”
“If he isn’t dead already,” said Tombstone. “So we have two options: exfiltrate al-Senussi ASAP, or liquidate Abu Bukatalla. It would bother me to bring Ibrahim in from the cold. He might still be able to persuade other people to support him. Younes wasn’t the only one. Besides, it’s a long drive to the Egyptian border. It’s more than four hundred miles, and you have to go through Derna, Abu Bukatalla’s home turf.”
“Can’t we fly him out?”
“There aren’t any flights before the weekend. The Agency could charter a plane, of course, but that would compromise him. So we’re in deep shit. The best solution is to snatch him. We’ll do what we discussed: throw Cynthia into the breach so we can contact Ibrahim and exfil him.”
The Madmen of Benghazi Page 14
