Libya was one of the most dangerous places in the world. It had gone from the wealthiest country in Africa, with the highest life expectancy on the continent, to a failed state.
These days, instead of rule by a ruthless dictator, local militias with shifting allegiances held sway. Your best friend in the morning could be your worst enemy by the afternoon. That made it difficult to conduct business and practically impossible to gather intelligence.
The key to success was to stuff your pockets with carrots and carry the biggest stick anyone had ever seen. Fortunately, McGee was able to provide Harvath with access to both.
As a new government of “national accord” was struggling to unite Libya from its capital in Tripoli, the CIA and U.S. military had been providing cover and breathing room by helping to hunt and kill Islamic militants. The last thing they wanted was for Libya to become another Caliphate or pre-9/11 Afghanistan.
In its multimillion-dollar game of whack-a-martyr, the CIA paid for actionable intelligence, which the United States Africa Command then used to carry out drone strikes. There was enough to keep everyone busy.
But with so much at stake, no one—especially Libya’s fledgling government—had time to deal with the smugglers. Paying off their local militias, they ran their businesses with virtual impunity.
For one smuggler, though, that was about to change.
Harvath had made it his mission to understand how they operated. What he learned made him want to kill all of them.
The smugglers employed two types of vessels: decommissioned, no-longer-seaworthy fishing trawlers and inflatable rubber boats. A decent-sized trawler could cram anywhere from 300 to 600, sometimes even 1,000 migrants looking to be smuggled to Italy. The rubber boats could only take 100 without sinking, but even so, they always tried to squeeze more on board.
Migrants came from all over Africa and the Middle East. From places like Niger, Mali, Sudan, and Syria. They handed over their life savings in hopes of making it to Europe and starting over in a better place.
None of the vessels they were loaded into had lights, flare guns, or safety equipment. Bottles of water and cans of tuna, if offered at all, were sold by the smugglers for a hundred dollars apiece. Rarely was enough fuel provided to make the trip—just enough to sail beyond Libyan territorial waters.
Of course the smugglers didn’t do any of the actual transporting themselves. Instead, they selected one or two passengers—often at gunpoint—handed them a satellite phone and a compass, and then sent them out into the open ocean.
In case of emergency, which was “smuggler speak” for when your boat runs out of fuel or falls apart and begins to take on water, the satellite phone had been preprogrammed with the emergency phone number for the Italian Coast Guard.
Even though the Europeans were operating a massive interdiction operation in the Mediterranean, they didn’t have enough assets to be everywhere. Under good weather, the smugglers were launching ten to fifteen boats a day, up and down the Libyan coast. Under bad weather, they still launched, though fewer boats.
Passengers along the route died from drowning, hypothermia, disease, starvation, shark attack, rape, beatings, and even murder.
Harvath had read harrowing accounts of people being reduced to eating toothpaste and drinking urine to stay alive, of women thrown overboard because observant Muslim men suspected them of menstruating and therefore being “unclean,” of people being packed so tightly in sweltering holds belowdecks that they all suffocated. The inhumanity of the smugglers, and even some of the passengers themselves, was on par with barbarity he had only seen in war.
And at the very top—the worst of the worst—was the man he had come looking for, Libyan smuggler Umar Ali Halim.
Plenty of Halim’s customers never even saw the water, much less a boat. He was notorious for splitting up families, selling women and children into the sex trade, or forcing them into his own private harem.
Anyone who resisted—be they husbands, mothers, fathers, it made no difference—was dealt with on the spot. They were savagely beaten, sometimes even to death, as a warning to the others.
Gang rape, lashings, being folded in his “flying carpet”—a board with metal hinges in the middle meant to shatter the victim’s spine—and other methods of torture, spoke to Halim’s depravity.
In his line of work, Harvath saw killing men like Halim as a public service. It needed to be done and required a willingness that not everyone possessed.
He knew that there were people who objected even to the thought of what he did for a living. Every once in a while, he wished he could get them an up-close view of animals like Halim. Maybe then they’d better understand not only what he did, but also why it was necessary.
Harvath had voiced that desire to a handful of people, one of them being Reed Carlton. He still remembered the Old Man’s response, “Everyone else wants to be appreciated. Not you. You’re not looking for thanks. You want to be understood. That’s what makes you different.”
He hadn’t thought much about it at the time. Probably because he didn’t feel “different.” He figured everyone else felt the way that he did. The whole “It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it” thing.
But people did feel different. Not all of them, but enough. Not long ago, he remembered a colleague saying, “While most of us are trying to come up with a plan on how to get out, you’re trying to figure out how to stay in.”
It was true. He had no desire to get out. He believed in what he was doing. And though he loved the idea of having a family, he didn’t want to give up his career.
That was probably the biggest difference he saw between himself and guys who were looking to pull the rip cord. They had families. They wanted a life beyond slinging a weapon for a living. Those who stayed in usually did it because they needed the money or didn’t know what else to do. Harvath, though, wanted to have his cake and eat it too.
“Really bad idea, exhibits D, E, and F, coming up on our right,” said Morrison, as they passed three more men in a pickup truck with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted in its bed, known as a technical.
The Libya Liberation Front was a brutal, local Islamist militia that provided protection for Halim and his smuggling operations. Even more unpalatable for Harvath and his team, though, was the fact that the Libya Liberation Front was aligned with Ansar al-Sharia, the Al Qaeda–linked group behind the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost and CIA annex in Benghazi.
They only numbered in the hundreds, but they had access to a ton of firepower. The last thing Harvath wanted was to tangle with them. It wouldn’t end well. Get in. Get the job done. Get out without being seen. That was his plan.
But as experience had taught him, things rarely went as planned. That was why McGee had made everything conditional on Harvath’s bringing the team.
Turning the corner, Haney piped up, cutting off Morrison and interrupting Harvath’s train of thought. “Approaching target,” he called out. “Three hundred meters. Left side.”