Brute Force

The guard pressed Mansour's identity card back into his outstretched hand.

'Drive.'

I didn't need to be told twice. I edged past the vehicle in front.

More shouting. Lots of excitement. The sentry on the barrier snapped a smartish-looking salute as we passed beneath it.

Mansour hit the button and his window slid upwards.

I blipped the accelerator and the Audi's big engine purred as we headed back out onto the open road.

I checked the mirror, glancing back every so often as the checkpoint receded into the distance. Nobody was following us. It soon disappeared in a cloud of dust.

I turned to Mansour. 'What happened?'

The big, satisfied grin had found its way back onto the cat's face. 'Gaddafi still uses many Russian advisers. There are Russians everywhere in this country. If there is one thing that terrifies the Kata'eb Al-Amn as much as the Great Guide himself, it's the Russians he surrounds himself with. I got the idea from our conversation earlier.'

The relief in the car was so great I could taste it.

I told Mansour I'd heard him mention our destination: Ajdabiya.

'There's an oil terminal in Ajdabiya that's run by a big Russian petroleum company. I told the officer we were going there. Why else would I have two white faces with me?'

Lynn placed his hand on the Libyan's shoulder. He spoke softly – and with a degree of approval that left me feeling uncomfortable. 'Stroke of genius, Mansour. Well done.'

We drove on in silence. As we passed the town of Al-Khoms, I noticed a sign in English, pointing the way to Leptis just a few kilometres to our left. I watched Lynn's reaction in the mirror. Needless to say, he knew exactly where we were. I studied his eyes as the sign slid past; he was like a kid catching sight of a disappearing ice-cream van.

At Misrata, we followed the road south for fifty kilometres, then took a right-hand fork and headed out into the Sahara. As we left the coast behind, the scrub became patchier and all traces of civilization gradually disappeared, leaving us with an endless flat landscape and a horizon that merged with the heat haze. The dark strip of tarmac stretched endlessly ahead of us, uninterrupted except for the odd rusting truck hurtling past in the opposite direction.

I'd crossed a lot of deserts, but nothing quite matched the desolation and loneliness of this particular stretch of the Sahara.

98

Several hours later we were down to a quarter of a tank. According to the sat nav there was a petrol station thirty-nine Ks ahead.

Mansour announced that our problems were going to start soon after it. The last time he'd driven this way, he'd encountered several roadblocks along one twenty-kilometre stretch. Rumours were rife of Russians buying huge tracts of coastline on which to build holiday homes. The police had been brought in to safeguard construction traffic and staff.

Mansour knew a way around the roadblocks. 'We can leave the road about ten kilometres after the filling station and use the old nomads' tracks. The vehicle can handle it.'

He turned in his seat. 'Al-Inn, I will show you something many, many times better than Leptis Magna. I found the bust of Septimus Severus very close to where we turn off.'

'How can you possibly say that?'

'You will see for yourself. Only a handful of people know about this place. I believe it to be the emperor's winter palace.'

I found myself tuning in. I now knew the value that antiquities could command on the black market. With a couple of busts in the boot, I could afford to disappear off the face of the earth.

As a boy, Mansour had been passed down stories from nomadic traders of ruins in the desert, north of Al- Waddan territory.

The traders had described the ruins as 'Roumi' – Roman – but there were many strange sights in the Sahara: from the relics of ancient caravanserais – stop-off points for travellers plying the trans-Sahara trade routes – to downed aircraft from the Second World War, some still with the mummified remains of their crews in their seats.

The stories were part of the myth and folklore of the desert. Nobody in Waddan paid them much attention.

But the possibility of a long-lost Roman site wouldn't release its grip on the young Mansour's imagination. He became obsessed with the idea of finding it.

Years later, he was given a helping hand – from Gaddafi, of all people.

More than ten years after graduating from the University of Tripoli, when he was an ambitious young army major, he was sent into the desert to help train the 'freedom fighters'.

Collating information on all the possible locations for the lost site, Mansour constructed a grid. Whenever he could, he took off in a jeep and worked his way across it.

One day, following a particularly violent sandstorm, he fell in with a band of Berber camel-herders who told