CHAPTER THREE
“Aardvark”
He was on an airliner headed down. There was a lot of screaming, but no sound. A sick, subdued terror seized his heart. He wrestled with his seat belt as the choppy sea rose to smash them.
He was afloat on some piece of jetsam. How long he drifted he did not know.
Otto woke scorched, ears ringing. For long seconds he lay still waiting for the nausea to subside, fearful of what had happened to his body. Tentatively he lifted a finger. Five fingers. An arm. The other arm. A leg. The other leg. He was bruised all over but there didn’t seem to be anything broken. A ceiling lay mere centimeters from his face. He touched it--fabric. He placed both hands against it and pushed. The barrier was too heavy for him to lift but it shifted.
Otto turned his head and saw a strip of sand. He was lying on the desert beneath some kind of shield. Slowly, painfully, he crabbed sideways extricating himself from the sand. The steel-mounted Qalicheh lay next to him, convex surface up. He had been blown out of the palace on a flying carpet. Otto sat up, bracing himself with both hands. Twenty meters away Ghaddafi’s palace, reduced to a pile of rubble, smoldered, sending a column of dark gray smoke whipping into the desert breeze.
The fierce winds of last night had abated, replaced by a steady 20 kph breeze that peppered Otto’s face with pins. Otto sat behind the carpet that had saved his life. He’d flown out of the palace’s fourth floor, forty meters into the sand on the eastern side, away from the village. He heard gunfire from inside the blazing ruin as vehicles vanished down the dirt road belching black smoke.
The Ilyushin roared to life and began to taxi.
Otto checked himself. Gun gone. Radio gone. He still had the tiny GPS transmitter but he was too close to Libyan Army to risk it. Amazingly, he still had a quart of water strapped to his belt. He had to get away. The palace was the center of too much attention.
Had Ghaddafi even been there?
Why had Hornbuckle left the room?
What was on the laptop?
Who fucked with the timing on the transmitter?
He slithered like a lizard away from the burning palace heading east toward the truncated sun.
In the days that followed Otto had plenty of time to review the events in his mind and try to figure out what happened.
He lived in the desert like some feral beast, laying low during the day, hunting and moving east at night. He would require a minimum two gallons a day for survival, up to five gallons if he exerted himself. On the second day, he found a furze of green at the outside curvature of a wadi, dug down until he felt moisture and built a still out of a sheet of plastic and a straw they all carried for that purpose. At the end of the day he had accumulated maybe half a cup. He ate one of his two precious energy bars.
He lay up during daytime in a shallow grave he’d carved from the carapace of sand. The ground surface was thirty degrees hotter than that a foot below. He considered pissing in the hole like the Kalahari bushmen, but didn’t have enough piss to make a difference.
By night the desert looked like the set of a vast black-and-white movie. Moon and star glow reflected off the quartzite rock and pale sands. Otto nearly stepped on a fat-tailed scorpion. He saw it at the last minute, foot paused in mid-air then slowly withdrawn. It was the Mother of All Scorpions. Five inches. Its chitinous, segmented body was the essence of evil, its sight repulsive and frightening.
Why had God made such creatures?
Who was he to question God?
There was no pursuit. Ghaddafi had his hands full with civil war. On the third day, Otto saw contrails to the North. He’d lost his GPS transmitter. Later that day he saw a caravan heading east several miles away on a ridge. Caravans were to be avoided at all costs.
He ate the last of his energy bars. His stomach screamed.
On the fourth day, he ate ants.
On the fifth day, he came upon a Canadian archaeological dig. Four white tents, some ruins, and two vehicles. He watched for several hours from a ridgetop with his mini binocs. There appeared to be two men and two women plus a half dozen locals to help with the dig. Maple leaf patches adorned their backpacks, tent, and vehicles, a Nissan Pathfinder and an old Chevy pick-up.
Otto didn’t have much of a choice. He had to take a chance. He hailed them from fifty meters. The men and one of the women were visible. They looked at him startled. He had appeared out of nowhere.
“Hallloooo! Sorry to bother you!”
As the two men and the woman turned to face him, unconsciously standing together, the other woman, middle-aged with a cap of silver hair, joined them. One of the men was tall and thin. The other was stocky, middle-aged, wearing those wrap-around shades that fit around glasses. The other woman was young and athletic, her long brown hair done up in a bun.
“Where did you come from?” she said.
“Otto White. I’m with Central Intelligence.”
The tall man said, “You’re a spy? An American spy?”
“We refer to ourselves as ops or agents. Listen, I hate to bother you, but I’m all that’s left of a seven-man team. Do you have any water?”
As the stocky man handed Otto his canteen, the older woman said, “You have ants on your chin.”
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