Dead or Alive Read online

  Tariq had initially considered engaging an escort service, but that brought its own complications—not insurmountable, certainly, but complicated nonetheless. Through their network here he had obtained the name of a service known for zealously protecting its clients’ privacy, so much so that it was used by many celebrities and politicians, including several U.S. senators. The irony of using such a service was tempting, Tariq had to admit.

  For now he would satisfy himself with engaging one of the street whores he’d been observing for the last week. Though she generally dressed as did all the others—in obnoxiously revealing outfits—her taste seemed slightly less appalling, her manner slightly less shameless. In the short term, she would do as a receptacle.

  He waited until well after the sun had set, then waited down the block, watching for a lull in traffic before pulling out and driving down to where the woman and her two companions stood. He pulled to a halt beside the curb and rolled down the passenger window. One of the women, a redhead with impossibly large breasts, strode toward the window.

  “Not you,” Tariq said. “The other one. The tall blonde.”

  “Suit yourself, mister. Hey, Trixie, he wants you.”

  Trixie sashayed over. “Hey,” she said. “Looking for a date?”

  “For a friend.”

  “Where is this friend?”

  “At his condominium.”

  “Don’t do in-home dates.”

  “Two thousand dollars,” Tariq replied, and immediately saw Trixie’s eyes change. “Your friends may take down my license plate, if they wish. My friend is . . . well known. He simply wants some anonymous companionship.”

  “Straight sex?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I don’t do rough trade. No water sports, nothing like that.”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay, hang on a sec, hon.” Trixie walked back to her friends, exchanged a few words, then returned to Tariq, who said, “You may ride in the back,” and clicked open the lock.

  “Oh, hey, fancy,” Trixie said, and got in.

  Please sit down,” the Emir said to her thirty minutes later, as Tariq brought her into the living room and made the introductions. “Would you like some wine?”

  “Uh, sure, I guess,” Trixie said. “I like that zinfandel stuff. That’s how you say it, right?”

  “Yes.” The Emir signaled to Tariq, who disappeared and returned a minute later with two glasses of wine. Trixie took hers, looked around anxiously, then dug in her purse and came up with a tissue, into which she spit the piece of gum she’d been chewing. She took a gulp of wine. “Pretty good stuff.”

  “Yes, it is. Is Trixie your real name?”

  “Yeah, actually. What’s yours?”

  “Believe it or not, my name is John.”

  Trixie barked out a laugh. “If you say so. So, what, you’re Arab or something?”

  Standing in the doorway behind Trixie, Tariq’s brows furrowed. The Emir lifted his index finger from the arm of his chair. Tariq nodded and stepped back a few feet.

  “I’m from Italy,” the Emir said. “Sicily.”

  “Hey, like The Godfather, right?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You know, the movie. That’s where the Corleones were from: Sicily.”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “Your accent sounds kind of funny. You live here, or just on vacation?”

  “Vacation.”

  “It’s a really nice house. You must be loaded, huh?”

  “The house belongs to a friend.”

  Trixie smiled. “A friend, huh? Maybe your friend would like some company.”

  “I’ll be sure to ask him,” the Emir said drily.

  “Just so you know: I only do straight, okay? Nothing kinky.”

  “Of course, Trixie.”

  “And no kissing on the mouth. Your guy said two thousand?”

  “Would you like your reimbursement now?”

  Trixie took another gulp of wine. “My what?”

  “Your money.”

  “Sure, then we can get started.” At the Emir’s signal, Tariq came forward and handed Trixie a wad of $100 bills. “No offense,” she said, then counted the bills. “You wanna do it here, or what?”

  An hour later the Emir emerged from the bedroom. Behind him, Trixie was slipping on her panties and humming to herself. At the dining room table, Tariq stood up to meet his boss. The Emir merely said, “Too many questions.”

  Afew minutes later in the garage, Tariq walked around the car to the rear door and opened it for her. “That was fun,” she said. “If your guy wants to do it again, you know where to find me.”

  “I’ll inform him.”

  As Trixie ducked down to enter the car, Tariq toe-kicked her behind the knee and she dropped down. “Hey, what—” were the only words she managed to get out before Tariq’s garrote, a two-foot piece of half-inch smooth nylon rope, looped around her neck and cinched down on her windpipe.

  As he’d planned, the rope’s twin knots, spaced five inches apart in the middle of the rope, immediately compressed the carotid arteries on either side of her trachea. Trixie began bucking, clawing at the rope, her back arching until Tariq could see her eyes—at first wide and bulging, and then slowly, as the blood flow to her brain dwindled, fluttering and rolling back into her head. After another ten seconds Trixie went limp. Tariq kept the pressure on the rope for another three minutes, standing perfectly still as the life slowly drained from her body. Strangulation was never the quick task one saw in Hollywood movies.

  He took two steps backward, dragging her along and slowly laying her body flat on the garage’s concrete floor. Carefully he unwrapped the rope from around her neck, then examined the skin beneath. There was some slight bruising but no blood. Even so, the rope would later be burned in a steel pail. He felt for a pulse at her neck and found none. She was dead, of that he was certain, but given their circumstances, an extra measure of caution was required.

  Placing one hand beneath her shoulders and the other beneath her buttocks, Tariq rolled Trixie onto her stomach, then straddled her at the waist. He placed his left hand beneath her chin, drew her head up toward him, then placed the flat of his right palm on the side of her head and levered his hands in opposite directions. The neck snapped. He reversed his hands and twisted the head back in the other direction, getting one more muffled pop. The body’s residual nerve impulses caused her legs to jerk once. He gently lowered the head back to the ground and stood up.

  Now all that remained was to decide how far into the desert to drive her.

  18

  THE RECEPTION they received upon touching down in Tripoli should have told Clark and Chavez all they needed to know about the mood of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and his generals, as well as what level of support they could expect. The People’s Militia lieutenant they found waiting at the bottom of the plane’s stairs was polite enough but green as the Libyan sun was hot, and the twitch under his left eye told Clark the man knew enough about his charges to be nervous. Good for you, boy. Clearly Qaddafi was less than pleased to have Western soldiers on his soil, let alone Western Special Forces soldiers. Whether his displeasure was born of pride or some deeper political motive Clark neither knew nor cared. As long as they stayed out of Rainbow’s way and didn’t get anyone inside the embassy killed, Muammar could be as pissy as he liked.

  The lieutenant snapped off a sharp salute to Clark, said “Masudi,” which Clark assumed was his name, then stepped aside and gestured toward a circa-1950 canvas canopied Army truck that sat idling fifty feet away. Clark gave the nod to Stanley, who ordered the team to gather the gear and head toward the truck.

  The sun was so hot it almost stung Clark’s skin, and sucking the superheated air into his lungs caused them to burn a bit. There was a slight breeze fluttering the flags on the hangar roof but not nearly enough to provide any cooling.

  “Hell, at least they sent somebody, huh?” Chavez muttered to Clark as they walked.r />
  “Always look on the bright side, eh, Ding?”

  “You got it, mano.”

  Within an hour of being pulled off the plane at Heathrow and getting the dump from Alistair Stanley, Clark, Chavez, and the remainder of the on-call R6 shooters were aboard a British Airways jet bound for Italy.

  As did all military teams, Rainbow had its fair share of personnel turnover as men returned to their home country’s unit, most of them for well-earned promotions after their work on Rainbow. Of the eight Stanley had picked for the op, four were originals: Master Chief Miguel Chin, Navy SEAL; Homer Johnston; Louis Loiselle; and Dieter Weber. Two Americans, a French-man, a German. Johnston and Loiselle were their snipers, and each was scary-good, their rounds rarely finding anything but X-ring.

  In fact, all of them were good shooters. He wasn’t in the least worried about them; you didn’t get to Rainbow without, one, having a lot of time in service, and two, being the best of the best. And you certainly didn’t stay in Rainbow without passing muster with Alistair Stanley, who was, though polite to the core, a real ass-kicker. Better to sweat in training than to bleed on an op, Clark reminded himself. It was an old SEAL adage, one that any Special Forces service worth a damn adhered to as if it were the word of God.

  After a brief stop in Rome they were shuttled to a waiting Piaggio P180 Avanti twin-engine turboprop kindly supplied by the 28th Army Aviation “Tucano” Squadron for the final hop to Taranto, where they sat and drank Chinotto, Italy’s herbal answer to American Sprite, while getting a history lesson from the base’s public-affairs officer on the history of Taranto, the Marina Militare, and its predecessor, the Regia Marina. After four hours of this, Stanley’s satellite phone went off. The politics had been settled. How they’d talked Qaddafi out of sending in his shock troops Clark didn’t know, and he didn’t care. Rainbow was green-lit.

  An hour later they reboarded the Avanti for the five-hundred-mile hop across the Med to Tripoli.

  Clark followed Chavez to the truck and climbed aboard. Sitting across the wooden bench seat from him was a man in civilian clothes.

  “Tad Richards,” the man said, shaking Clark’s hand, “U.S. embassy.”

  Clark didn’t bother asking the man’s position. The answer would likely involve a combination of words like attaché, cultural, junior, and 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 Miami Vice. The room smelled of fresh paint. A large picture window framed by date palms overlooked at a distance of two hundred meters what Clark assumed was the Swedish embassy, a Spanish-style two-story villa surrounded by eight-foot-high white stucco walls topped with black wrought-iron spikes. The building’s ground floor sported plenty of windows, but all of them were barred and shuttered.

  Six thousand square feet at least, Clark thought sourly. A lot of territory. Plus maybe a basement.

  He had half expected to find a colonel or general or two from the People’s Militia waiting for them, but there was no one. Evidently, Masudi was to be their only contact with the Libyan government, which suited Clark fine, as long as the man had the requisite horsepower to provide what they requested.

  The street below looked like a damned military parade. Of the two visible streets adjacent to the embassy, Clark counted no fewer than six Army vehicles, two jeeps and four trucks, each surrounded by a group of soldiers, smoking and m
illing about, bolt-action rifles casually dangling from their shoulders. If he hadn’t already known it, the soldiers’ weapons would have told Clark everything he needed to know about Qaddafi’s attitude toward the crisis. Having been pushed out of the loop in his own country, the colonel had taken his elite troops off the perimeter and replaced them with the shabbiest grunts he could field.

  Like a spoiled little boy taking his marbles and going home.

  While Chavez and the others started unpacking the gear and sorting it in the unfinished breakfast nook, Clark and Stanley surveyed the embassy compound through binoculars. Richards and Lieutenant Masudi stood off to one side. After two minutes of silence, Stanley said without lowering his binoculars, “Tough one.”

  “Yep,” Clark answered. “You see any movement?”

  “No. Those are plantation shutters. Good and solid.”

  “Fixed surveillance camera on each corner, just below the eaves, and two along the front façade.”

  “Best assume the same for the rear façade,” Stanley replied. “The question is, did the security folks have time to mash the button?”

  Most embassies had an emergency checklist that any security detail worth a damn would know by heart. At the top of the list, titled “In Case of Armed Intrusion and Embassy Takeover” or something similar, would be an instruction to fatally disable the facility’s external surveillance system. Blind bad guys are easier to take down. Whether or not the Swedes had done this there was no way of telling, so Rainbow would assume the cameras were not only functional but also being monitored. The good news was the cameras were fixed, which made it much easier to pick out blind spots and coverage gaps.