Tears in Tripoli: A Jake Collins Novel (Jake Collins Novels Book 1)

by Paul A. Rice

  After all, I was in love…

  With a sigh, I rose to my feet and went for a fresh brew – I still had an hour or two to wait for my flight to London where I was to pick up some body armour, a few satellite phones and some medical kit, before heading straight on, via France, to Djerba in Tunisia. After that it was all set to be a guessing game – the client was in Libya, Tripoli, to be precise, and I had to get there and meet them. That was the guessing bit. Crossing into Libya these days was a bit hazardous, to say the least. Still, we had a ‘fixer’ in Tunisia. These guys were local, well-connected and could pretty-much organise anything that people like me needed – for a price.

  Sitting back down at my table, I lit a smoke and fired-up my laptop. The email from my employers explained it all: the client was a well-known, American TV correspondent. Apparently, the rest of the crew, cameramen, sound-techs and producers, were already in Libya. The present correspondent had been taken violently ill and was currently en-route the USA in an air-ambulance. My client, someone called Andy, was himself now flying across the world in order to get into Libya. Ideally he would be in Tunisia when I arrived, that way we could get across the border together, but if things changed then we would meet in Tripoli.

  I didn’t care when we met because, frankly, I was being paid now.

  I should have Googled the guy. I normally do as it’s useful to know a bit about the person who you’re going to be looking after, before you meet them. But I didn’t bother as I was too tired after a long stint in Afghanistan. I had only left Kabul this morning and the thought of dealing with yet another, high-flying journalist was draining.

  I’d learned that you just have to make things up as you go along with these guys. It’s a totally people-driven exercise, some of them are really great people who understand why they have security guys like me along for the ride – it’s all about corporate responsibility and the due diligence of their employers.

  The smart ones know this and just go with the flow, using my experience and knowledge to enhance their trip. Most times we have a good laugh, and after a few days they accept me for who I am, and what I’m there for. I’ve had brilliant experiences with these types of people; they’re very good at their jobs and, as a whole, are very well-educated and very well-travelled, too. I’ve had such a good time on some jobs that it seemed weird to be getting paid. However, there are the others – the walking egos, the know-it-all danger-seekers, and the ‘big story’ wannabes. They’re the ones who get themselves killed, and you alongside.

  They lie and cheat and try to get away from you, as though you’re the enemy. It’s crazy. They are paying for my services, so why act like an arsehole? If you want to go down there, to where there are gunmen loosing off clip-after-clip of wildly inaccurate, machinegun fire, then I’ll most likely advise you against that. But, if you insist, then we’ll go. It’s your life and I’ve been shot at plenty of times before. But, to sneak off and do it without telling me, without any back-up, is just plain crazy.

  I’d just had one of the latter types in Kabul. The whole trip had been a nightmare and to get away from such a self-centred individual was a blessing. I just hoped that this Andy guy was going to be nicer – Libya had been on fire since February and right now some really big shit was starting to happen in Tripoli. And, as usual, that was precisely where I was heading.

  I powered the laptop down and looked up at the departures information board. Guessing I could do with a stretch of the legs, I slowly packed away my stuff, sliding the computer into the padded pouch on the inside of my black daysack. I put on my old jacket, the baggy, beige material was comforting – it was my oldest and wisest travel companion.

  The thought made me smile. ‘Just me and my old jacket, well… here we go again, my friend. Let’s go and see what happens this time, shall we?’ I slung the pack over my shoulder and headed for the escalator.

  New adventures awaited and even though I still had a slightly sick feeling in my guts, the idea of pastures-new excited me. Seeing the ‘Now boarding…’ signal flashing up next to my flight, I opened my legs and started the long walk down to where my departure gate lay.

  Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the feeling in my stomach – sometimes your gut can warn you of things, and I above all people should know that. But I didn’t.

  Sometimes things happen in precisely the way in which they’re meant to happen, and when those wheels are in motion there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it. You’re just a passenger on a wild ride, so it’s best to hold on tight and simply go with the flow.

  It’s like being part of a machine.

  3

  The Machine

  The flight to London was a doddle – I slept almost the whole way, waking with a sore backside and a cramp in my left leg. Even the business-class seats on that flight were too small for a proper stretch-out. Still, it wasn’t the first time and I knew that it wouldn’t be the last. You get used to it, there’s no joy left in travel for me these days – it’s just a teeth-grinding exercise in patience.

  After getting through border control and customs without a glitch, I ambled down to the departure gates to meet the person who was bringing all the gear I had to take across to Libya. Grabbing a coffee, I parked my arse on a metal seat near the Paris check-in gate. No sooner had I sat down when my phone rang.

  Answering it, I was greeted by a voice I knew…

  ‘Ah, hello there, Jake, you old git, I’ve got some gear for you. Where are you hiding – in the bar?’ I hadn’t heard from him for a while, but I would have recognised that voice anywhere.

  ‘Joey? What the hell are you doing here?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I took your advice and sent these good-people my CV, just like you said I should. Now I work full-time for ‘em!’ Joey replied, with a laugh.

  I told him where I was, and sure enough, five minutes later along comes Joey Smith – trundling over with a stack of kit piled onto an airport trolley. Seeing me sitting there in my old coat must have amused him, he grinned widely and made his way over, pushing the trolley as hard as he could, swinging his legs like a kid as he glided along on the back of a free ride.

  ‘JC, you old bugger!’ he exclaimed. ‘Look at you – still wearing that minging old coat, I see! You look like a bloody tramp in that, man!’ Joey stood there, leaning on the trolley and shaking his head.

  I rose to my feet – we shook hands and exchanged a few pleasantries whilst Joey gave me the low-down on the kit I had to take from him. Once I had checked it over and agreed that it was all there, he then offered me a brown envelope.

  Begrudgingly he handed it over, saying: ‘There’s five-grand in US dollars in there – Richard says that you should use it as necessary, just bring the receipts back with you as normal…’

  I had to forcibly prize his fingers apart in order to take the envelope from him. Joey and I went back a long way and ever since the first day I had met him, he’d been as tight as a duck’s arse.

  ‘All right, let it go, big boy,’ I said. ‘It’s the firm’s loot, so back off!’

  He grinned, saying: ‘Yeah, I know. But it still kind of kills me to hand over any cash to you – I just know that you’ll bloody lose it or something…’

  ‘Fuck-off, Joey,’ I said, waggling the envelope teasingly. ‘Come on, let’s get this gear checked in and then we can go for a beer whilst I count this – it’s not that I don’t trust you, mate, but…’

  He shook his head in disgust and helped me drag the trolley across to the check-in. Fifteen minutes later, and after Joe had zipped around the corner to go and pay the excess-baggage charges, I had checked in and we were sitting in the bar, knocking back some nice cold lager.

  We chatted for a while – it was good to hear that he was back in full-time employment. Joey had taken a nasty hit whilst we had been on a job in Iraq. The company we had been working for at the time had only done the bare minimum for him after he was wounded, and in short-order he had been back in the UK
with no money, no job, and only half a leg. A few of us had rallied around and made sure that he had enough cash for the time being. It wasn’t something we could do forever, and so, after some heavy networking, I had managed to convince my current boss that Joey Smith was a guy worth having on his books. It seemed as though I had been right; after several low-profile tasks, they had taken Joey on full-time.

  ‘I don’t get to do the juicy stuff anymore,’ he said, looking down at his leg. ‘But the new prosthetic is a good one and people hardly notice these days.’

  He went on to tell me how he was hoping to get back into the field as soon as he had completed some more training with his new, high-tech limb. He also thanked me profusely for helping him get back into the machine. It was the least I could have done and I wished him well – Joey was a good guy, and one you could rely upon when things got a bit hairy. We had another couple of beers and then it was time for me to go. Joey gave me a warm handshake, told me to keep my head down, and we parted company.

  I slept again, all the way through to France, caught my connecting flight without hassle, and then did the same thing again, sleeping all the way until they informed us that we were starting to descend into Djerba. The airport beers had left me with a dry mouth and I hoped that there wouldn’t be any delays in getting through Tunisian passport control – there weren’t. I just told the guy I was ‘Press’, he nodded and stamped my passport. The last six months’ worth of trouble in Libya had ensured that members of the press were now a very common sight in the airports of Tunisia.

  It was a crazy situation – Tunisia had been the country in which the Arab Spring had started. An anonymous fruit and vegetable seller sets fire to himself in protest and hey-presto, the whole region erupts. Tunisia had managed to achieve their revolution without any real bloodshed and their elections were now scheduled for later in the year, October, to be exact. But, here I was, heading for their neighbouring country where thousands had been killed, and probably just as many were yet to face the same fate.

  The Libyan revolution was anything but bloodless.

  Pushing those thoughts away, I collected my bags and wheeled them through customs without incident. Mustafa, the fixer, was waiting for me outside – he had a piece of A4 paper with my name scribbled on it. We shook hands and had a smoke. I was glad of the break and of the nicotine. The air was warm for such a late night. As I stood there, inhaling smoke and atmosphere, a whole herd of holiday-makers came blasting through the doors. A mixture of accents, mostly German and French, mingled with the local dialect. I could hear them talking amid the shouts of: ‘Taxi – you want taxi?’ and the shrill blast of police whistles as the local cops tried to get people moving.

  Mustafa… or ‘Mus’ as he liked to be called… drove me to the hotel. ‘It’s the second-best hotel in Djerba,’ he told me. ‘You could have stayed in the best one, but your boss… he’s a bit funny with, you know…?’ Mus made a face and rubbed his fingers together in the international sign for money.

  ‘Yeah, I do know, Mus,’ I said, with a chuckle. ‘Second-best hotel, huh? That’s good…’ Actually it was more like ‘that’s bloody typical – why not the best hotel, just for once?’ I grinned and kept the thoughts to myself, sitting in silence and watching the flashing lights of passing traffic. In all honesty I couldn’t have cared less – when you’ve spent half your life sleeping on the floor or in even worse places, then any hotel is a bonus, even if it was only second-best. The truth was that I had been to that particular hotel several times before, but I didn’t know Mus and he didn’t need to know about me. It was the first time we had used his services so it’s always best to be a bit guarded until you get to know the guy a bit better.

  The second-best thing still made me smile though.

  As we travelled along, dodging old Datsun taxis that must have been thirty-five-years-old if they were a day. I wrote out a list of things that I needed Mus to get me for my trip into Libya. My guess was that a lot of things weren’t going to be available to the likes of me, and if I was going to be on the road with some Pulitzer-hungry journo, I didn’t figure there would be much time to stop and go shopping, either. Finishing the list, I stuck it on top of his dashboard and asked him not to forget to get them before he picked me up. Mus smiled at me and said that I should consider it done.

  We soon arrived at the hotel, and if this was second-best then the number-one must have been great; the place was good and always had been. It was clean and tidy, had friendly staff, some nice décor, and the rooms were well kitted-out. Yeah, it suited me just fine. Oh, and the second-best hotel had a bar, too – at least one.

  I only needed one.

  I left all of my extra gear with Mus – he would bring it with him when we eventually got the go-ahead to cross over into Libya. In the meantime, he checked me in with reception and then, whilst the bell-boy humped my suitcase up to the room, Mus accompanied me to the bar. It was choc-a-block with press types. All the journos and their crews were there, some I knew from previous jobs, some spoke to you and some didn’t. Nobody cared. There were also a decent handful of security personnel, and I definitely knew quite a few of those guys. Most of them spoke and all of them drank – well, the ones around me did. We made small talk for a while and after a few drinks, Mus made his excuses and left. He may have been a Muslim, but I don’t think he was practising as the big guy was already half-cut when he’d picked me up at the airport. Like I said before – nobody cared, least of all me.

  Once he’d left, a few of the blokes gathered around and we had a good old chinwag about the situation in Tripoli. I’d been there several times earlier in the year, and the whole lot of us, all the press and their crews, had been incarcerated in the Hotel Rixos, Tripoli. Here we stayed at the behest of the Gadaffi government, and here we did exactly as we were told to do by our ‘minders’ – government henchmen who watched us like hawks and made sure that we reported what they wanted us to report.

  It was a joke, a very dangerous joke.

  If they had ever found out that people like me were actually security guys, and that we were there to look after the world’s press, well, the chances were that maybe we would have had to do a little explaining to those minders, and their gun-toting mates. No, we kept an ultra-low profile and gone about our business in a very clandestine manner. I, personally, did a few things whilst I was there that lay well beyond the realms of the duties belonging to a mere security advisor. But that’s another story, which I’ll tell about you in a while.

  The press guys had gone stir-crazy during their time in that hotel – not being able to get out on the streets of Tripoli and find the story, interview people at will and make factually-based, honest reports, must have nearly killed them. Indeed, many of them were given a very hard time by the Libyan minders. If ever they were found to have posted a report that Gadaffi and his gang didn’t like, then they were for the high-jump. Often you would see them being loaded onto the border-bound bus with only a moment’s notice. If you didn’t play by the minders’ rules, you didn’t play. End of story and bye-bye it was. Explain that to the boss when you get back to London or New York. Losing the network’s foothold in Libya during its greatest crisis would not have done much for your career.

  The guys and I sat around the bar and chewed the fat for a while. Seemingly there were quite a few TV crews still in the Rixos. That worried me. The Rebels were very close to Tripoli and one of our greatest fears was that in the event of the Rebels overrunning Tripoli, all of those foreigners in the Rixos would be held hostage by Gadaffi’s forces, or worse – killed outright. To be stuck in that place when Tripoli was about to explode, was not good by any means.

  So, after swapping notes and generally having a good piss-up in the process, we all decided to see what the next few days would bring. I loaded as many names and contact numbers into my satellite-phone as was possible, said goodnight, and went to find the elevator.

  Once I was in the room, I busily transferred all of the items
from my suitcase into my daysack – there was a lot of stuff I carried that wouldn’t get through security as hand-luggage in an airport. Nothing dodgy, just items that I carried with me around the planet, items that I’d used on more than one occasion.

  The ‘goodies’ I carried, and always carry when I’m working abroad, came in the form of a really decent Garmin GPS device – it picks up satellites and can give you your position anywhere on the planet. It also has a useful map facility – even though the Libyan one would be basic, at least I could see where the hell I was, and more importantly, I could let others know. Then I had a medical kit, with all sorts of dressings and tourniquets etcetera in it. I always carried a length of nylon cord and a karabiner, which is a metal clip that is mainly used for rock-climbing, but is very useful in other situations too. I also had a decent multi-tool and a sharp knife. Finally, I had two torches and a set of mini-binoculars.

  All these items, along with my trusty floppy hat and a slack-handful of shemaghs, the Arabic headdress being useful for a multitude of tasks, accounted for most of the objects in my daysack. There were also some cigarettes, a few headache tablets, a tube of lip salve and some insect repellent. As long as I had that pack, I knew that I could get by if a situation arose.

  At about 02:00hrs, just as I’d finished packing the daysack, I received a text – the planned border-crossing was a goer. Mus would pick me up after breakfast in the morning and the client would be following the next day. When I asked if I should wait in Djerba for the client, the texted reply was straightforward.

  ‘No, they need people on the ground right now,’ it said. ‘We’ll get the client to you, Rory will bring them across. We are throwing everyone we’ve got into Tripoli; we’ll sort-out who is working with who, later.’