The Madmen of Benghazi Read online

  Standing on the roof of the van, al-Afghani pivoted to his left. He had just moments to act.

  Holding his breath, he kept his eye on the plane, slowly turning as it approached. The big airliner passed about three hundred feet above the ground, and he recognized the British Airways logo on its tail.

  It was his target.

  The plane was now right in front of him, descending toward the runway, the glow of its two jets clearly visible.

  It would touch down in about thirty seconds. Al-Afghani activated the target-seeking system, and a buzzer and a blinking red light told him that the Strela had locked onto its target. To send the missile streaking toward the plane, all he had to do was pull the trigger.

  The captain of the 777 had switched off the automatic pilot and was concentrating on his instruments as he brought the plane in for landing. Suddenly, his copilot screamed:

  “Oh my God!”

  The pilot jerked his head up, catching a momentary glimpse of a man standing on a van by the airport fence, pointing a long tube at his plane.

  Of all possible dangers, this was the absolute worst: a missile fired at a passenger plane, which was as vulnerable as an elephant before a tank.

  Clutching the controls, the pilot yelled into his microphone:

  “Cairo Control, terrorist attack! Terrorist attack! BA 132! BA 132!”

  Knowing that it wouldn’t do any good.

  Al-Afghani held his breath and pulled the Strela’s trigger. In front of him, the huge bulk of the Boeing 777 was still a hundred feet off the ground. The launcher gave a muffled thump, and its recoil knocked him backward. The missile raced straight for the plane at nine thousand miles per hour, its infrared guidance system locked onto the heat of the two jet engines.

  Without waiting to see the result of his shot, al-Afghani jumped down inside the van, threw the launcher into the back, and yelled:

  “Allahu akbar!”

  The driver had already started up the engine, and he made a fast U-turn back toward the Airport Bridge and Ahmed Ismail Boulevard, the road leading to Cairo.

  The Mercedes carrying Malko Linge turned off the Nile Road and stopped at a row of retractable bollards protecting the entrance of the Four Seasons Hotel.

  A guard flipped a switch, the bollards sank into the roadway, and the Mercedes drove on to the hotel entrance. The Four Seasons overlooked the Nile, and its soaring columns suggested the Egypt of the pharaohs. The neighborhood was called Garden City, but there wasn’t a scrap of greenery to be seen.

  Cairo was one of the ugliest cities in the world, Malko thought. The facades of the buildings along the Nile were black and grimy, pockmarked by countless air conditioners. Coming in from the airport, all the Austrian saw were endless blocks of tan, twenty-story buildings, with hundreds of dish antennas sprouting from their flat roofs. The flat, sprawling, scabby city reminded him of the Soviet Union.

  At the last census, Cairo had eighteen million inhabitants, a quarter of the entire Egyptian population. Aside from the tourist hotels on the banks of the Nile, it was a jumble of decaying apartment houses jammed one next to the other. A tangle of urban freeways made the city especially unpleasant, not to mention traffic that clogged the streets for miles.

  Malko’s car had spent ten minutes stuck behind a Volkswagen minibus full of women in niqabs that had broken down in the middle of the road.

  As he got out of the Mercedes, his driver respectfully said:

  “I’ll wait for you here, sir.”

  The driver was a powerfully built man with huge eyebrows, a thick mustache, and a square jaw who’d met Malko at the airport terminal. He said his name was Nasser Ihab, and he’d been sent by the American embassy. What he didn’t tell Malko until later was that he was an agent of the Mukhabarat, Egypt’s domestic intelligence service.

  Malko entered the hotel’s majestic lobby. In the center of the marble floor stood a raised tearoom occupied only by men. Below them, a pianist played melancholy tunes reminiscent of a hotel in Eastern Europe.

  Registration was handled in record time by a smiling desk clerk. There were almost no tourists in Egypt these days, and the staff was especially affable.

  Within minutes, Malko was in a beautiful room overlooking the brown waters of the Nile. Thanks to air-conditioning, the place was pleasantly chilly. He took a quick shower and went back downstairs to the Mercedes. He dropped into the backseat, and Nasser took off immediately.

  “We’re going to the American embassy,” Malko announced.

  They passed the large British diplomatic compound, which ran along a hundred yards of riverfront, then left the Nile for the narrow streets of Saadan City.

  Once again, Malko found himself in a new country without quite knowing why.

  In a friendly phone call, the CIA station chief in Vienna had asked him if he wouldn’t mind going to Cairo for the Agency. Without telling him why, of course.

  It would have been hard for Malko to refuse. Winter was approaching and the bills to maintain his beloved Liezen castle would soon come flooding in. If it weren’t for his freelance CIA work, Malko would be just another impoverished Austrian noble-man, probably renting out his ancestral home for business retreats. But Malko had some highly specialized talents that the CIA employed on a regular basis. The Agency paid top dollar, but in exchange gave him the riskiest assignments.

  Malko had invited his longtime fiancée, Alexandra, to come to Egypt with him, but she politely refused. The Upper Austria social season was about to begin and she didn’t want to miss any of the galas. Her one concession to Malko: dressed in a bustier and smoky gray tights, she concocted a particularly erotic farewell dinner, and afterward gave him a dazzling demonstration of her talents, as if to show him what he was leaving behind. The next day she agreed to accompany him to Schwechat airport for a quickie on the road, having taken the elementary precaution of not wearing panties.

  Nasser stopped the Mercedes at a little square five hundred yards beyond the British embassy. He turned back to Malko and pointed to a street on the left.

  “Amerika-el-Latiniya is closed off,” he said. “There’s no way to drive any farther. The embassy’s just a hundred yards away. Here’s my number. Call me when you’re finished.”

  By then, a nervous traffic cop was already waving him on.

  The Cairene police were on edge. After a recent incident in the Sinai, where Israeli border guards had killed five Egyptian policemen, the crowd peacefully demonstrating in Tahrir Square had stormed the Israeli embassy. It occupied the top three floors in the Shana al-Tahrir building between Nadar Square and the El-Gamaa Bridge on the west bank of the Nile.

  With contagious enthusiasm, hundreds of young people attacked the place, even though it was protected by the army. They didn’t set the building on fire—most of the other tenants were Egyptian—just smashed in the embassy office doors. The Israelis barricaded themselves on the top two floors and called for help. Frustrated in their desire to throw the diplomats out the window, the mob tossed their files out instead.

  A demonstrator tore down the Israeli flag hanging on the facade and replaced it with an Egyptian one.

  A police helicopter landed on the roof to evacuate the ambassador. And the later police counterattack was violent: four dead and nine hundred wounded.

  The Nile was no longer a long, tranquil river.

  Amerika-el-Latiniya Street, which led to the U.S. embassy, was completely blocked by a crowd of militant Islamists sitting on carpets in the street. Around them hung color posters calling for the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the old blind sheikh serving a life sentence in the United States for his role in the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. Other banners above the street showed the sheikh in a turban, with dark glasses and a full beard.

  That the silent demonstration was permanent said a great deal about the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence in Egypt.

  Malko stepped around a couple of demonstrators and made his way to a barrier in front of the emba
ssy manned by armed and wary Egyptian soldiers stationed behind chicanes and sandbags.

  After a laborious conversation, it took a good ten minutes before an embassy employee appeared, a badge-wearing young woman whose shape suggested she’d been eating too many Turkish delights. She led Malko through the no-man’s-land to the pink building that housed diplomatic services.

  “Mr. Tombstone is expecting you,” she said.

  “Turkish, American, or espresso?”

  Jerry Tombstone recited the choices in a slow, somewhat deliberate voice.

  “Espresso, please,” said Malko. This would be the first time he got a decent cup of coffee in an American embassy, he thought.

  Tombstone went to a Nespresso machine in the back of his office. The Cairo CIA station chief was burly and very tall, and moved like a rugby player. But his bespoke striped shirt and red tie suggested a certain sophistication.

  Malko studied Tombstone as he returned with the coffee. He had tufts of red hair on a balding scalp, a long nose, and a look of quiet intelligence, slow but sharp. He looked more like a Harvard professor than a CIA operative.

  “Your mission in this beautiful country should give you a rest after your recent adventures,” he said as Malko savored his espresso. “I hope you like the sun! My skin can’t take it, so I go out as little as possible. Besides, there’s nothing to do in this damn city.”

  He paused.

  “You know why you’re in Cairo, don’t you?”

  “No. You’ll have to tell me.”

  “So nobody talked. Excellent.”

  Tombstone gave a dry chuckle and handed Malko a packet of photos from his desk.

  “Let’s start with these,” he said.

  The pictures were all of the same person, a gorgeous woman with long blond hair. She appeared in a variety of settings. First, getting out of a red Austin Mini with a British license plate, showing off a pair of very long legs. Then, wearing different outfits: an evening dress, an almost severe pants suit, a miniskirt, boots. The last shots had been taken during a bathing suit fashion show and displayed almost all of the unknown woman’s magnificent body. On one photo Malko noticed an amused look in her almond-shaped eyes and a greedy pout.

  Malko put the photos down and grinned.

  “A married man’s impossible dream!” he said. “I’m guessing she’s not in London anymore; otherwise, that’s where I’d be.”

  “You’re right. She’s staying at the same place you are. The Four Seasons, Room 2704.”

  “Is she expecting me?”

  “Not really,” said Tombstone with a slight smile, “but I’m counting on you to get to know her. I don’t think that should be too hard.”

  “What makes you say so?”

  “Cynthia Mulligan is a fairly well-known model in London. She lives in an elegant Chelsea studio and doesn’t seem to have money problems. MI5 has been keeping an eye on her. They say she’s bisexual, on a ratio of about one man to twenty women. We know some of her girlfriends, but not all of them.”

  “Given her profile, what makes you think she’ll fall for me? You’d do better to send a woman.”

  Tombstone gave a short laugh.

  “Our antidiscrimination rules don’t let us do that! Anyway, Ted Boteler in special ops claims you’re able to seduce any woman alive.”

  The CIA station chief’s tone was light, but Malko knew he wasn’t joking.

  “I’m prepared to use my charm in a good cause,” he said. “So what is this ravishing creature doing in Cairo?”

  “She’s here with her boyfriend. This man, here.”

  Tombstone brought a new packet of photos from his desk. These were a lot less glamorous. They showed a very well-dressed dark-skinned man with short, curly hair and a face like Barack Obama’s.

  “This is Mulligan’s current lover, Prince Ibrahim al-Senussi, a Libyan businessman. He’s rich, lives in Belgravia in London, and is madly in love with her.”

  Malko looked up sharply.

  “That isn’t going to make things easy.”

  Tombstone airily dismissed the Libyan prince with a wave of his freckled hand.

  “I doubt that many of your conquests were just lying around waiting for you to show up,” he said. “Anyway, this is no game. You have to deliver.”

  Any apparent lightness had disappeared.

  “I suspect my seduction enterprise isn’t the entire mission,” said Malko.

  “That’s right. It’s just the easiest and most pleasant part. We absolutely need to learn some things, and it’s only by getting close to Cynthia Mulligan that we have a chance of finding them out.”

  “Women don’t always talk,” objected Malko. “They protect the men they love.”

  “I doubt Mulligan is in love with al-Senussi,” said Tombstone dryly.

  “But she’s here with him in Cairo, and I imagine they sleep in the same bed.”

  The American gave an ironic smile.

  “He’s crazy about her, and let’s say she puts up with it.”

  “So why is she in Cairo, if she doesn’t have feelings for him?”

  Tombstone sighed and ran a hand over his bald scalp.

  “I don’t know that much about women,” he admitted, “but they often act on complicated motives. From what we’ve determined, al-Senussi went to great lengths to get her to take the trip. He’s very rich. Maybe Mulligan felt like seeing the Pyramids or spending a pleasant vacation in a palace.”

  “Let’s suppose you’re right and I’m able to seduce her. What is the name of the game?”

  Leaning back in his armchair, Jerry Tombstone spoke slowly and distinctly:

  “We want to find out who tried to kill them eight days ago, in a particularly brutal way, along with two hundred and seventy-seven other people.”

  “Not exactly a targeted killing,” said Malko with a touch of black humor.

  “If the attack had succeeded, every passenger on Flight 132 would be dead,” Tombstone said.

  “So what happened, exactly?”

  “BA 132 from London was on final approach, coming in at very low altitude. As it flew over the airport perimeter, one of the pilots saw a man on top of a van pointing what looked like a portable surface-to-air missile at the plane.”

  “What then?”

  “The pilot was scared out of his wits, of course. But he saw the missile fly harmlessly under the plane just before the 777’s wheels touched down.”

  “Did they find the shooter?”

  “No. From what we’ve been able to figure out, he fired a SAM-14 Strela. It’s a heat-seeking missile and should have flown into one of the jet’s engines and blown everything up. But two miracles happened.

  “First, the infrared guidance system didn’t work, so it missed its target. Otherwise, bye-bye, Boeing. Second, the missile’s autodestruct mechanism, which should have blown it up fourteen to eighteen seconds after missing the target, didn’t work either. Mukhabarat agents found the Strela on the runway the following morning, intact. Our Egyptian colleagues gave us its serial numbers right away, of course. They know that our database is much more complete than theirs.

  “We found that the Strela was part of a batch of five hundred missiles delivered to Libya in 1998 by Rosoboronexport, the Russian state arms sales agency. We even learned that the Libyans asked the Russians for much more modern SAMs but were turned down. They gave them a batch of Strelas that weren’t being manufactured anymore instead. Our missile probably didn’t work because it hadn’t been maintained. The Russians feel that Strelas aren’t worth a damn after ten years.”

  Puzzled, Malko asked, “How could a SAM delivered to Qaddafi in Libya thirteen years ago turn up here in Cairo?”

  “We have a theory,” said the CIA station chief. “It involves a very dangerous Islamist named Abu Bukatalla. If you don’t mind a short lecture, I’ll tell you all about him.”

  Malko sat back in his armchair, and Tombstone continued.

  “From documents recovered in Tripoli,
we know these Strelas were stored in a Libyan army barracks in Bayda, a city east of Benghazi,” he said. “Two days after the February 17 Revolution, a mob of insurgents drove Qaddafi’s soldiers out and ransacked the depot, down to the last cartridge.”

  “What became of the weapons?” asked Malko.

  “Well, we’ve found one of them, at least,” the American said with an ironic smile. “The others just vanished. A lot were looted by the Libyans; others were probably shipped south to Niger and Mali, to reinforce the militias of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. French intelligence alerted us that AQIM members came to Benghazi shopping for weapons. Some of the matériel went to Egypt. In fact, the Egyptian army intercepted two trucks crammed with weapons: AK-47s, RPG-7s, and ammunition. We aren’t really concerned about that. But this is the first sign of the stock of forty Strelas stored at Bayda.”

  “Weren’t they sent to Gaza?”

  “That’s a distinct possibility,” said Tombstone, “but not necessarily to Hamas. Probably a radical Salafist group there called the Jund Ansar Allah that is financed by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. And this is important: they’re also linked with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s clandestine branch, which in turn is close to Abu Bukatalla, the head of a Libyan takfiri militia. Takfiri are the most extreme Islamists. They consider Muslims who don’t agree with them to be apostates who deserve to have their throats cut.”

  “So what does Abu Bukatalla have to do with al-Senussi?” asked Malko.

  “From wiretaps, we know Abu Bukatalla is intimately connected to Qatar and wants to build an Islamic caliphate in Libya,” said the CIA station chief. “The last thing Abu Bukatalla wants is a modern monarch backed by the West.”

  As Malko listened to Tombstone’s presentation, he became more and more perplexed.

  “Are you saying that Abu Bukatalla wanted to kill al-Senussi so badly that he would sacrifice all the other passengers on the flight?” he asked. “There are easier ways of getting rid of people.”