Bride of a Bygone War (2 page)

“Well, okay, two to three months, depending on how long it takes Headquarters to find my replacement.”

“Shucks, Walt,” Strickland chuckled. “I hate to be the one to break it to you, old pal, but they’ve already found your replacement. It’s you.”

The newcomer’s jaws clenched and his lips drew back in the hint of a snarl, but before Strickland could react, Lukash let out a deep breath and his eyes took on an expression akin to resignation. “That would be just like Headquarters, wouldn’t it?”

Strickland was pondering Lukash’s sudden change of expression when he saw Prosser crossing the weed-choked median strip that separated the arrivals terminal from the diplomatic parking zone, where the station wagon was waiting. Even at a distance Strickland could see Prosser’s displeasure that his charge had evaded him.

“Where have you been?” Prosser greeted Lukash irritably, foregoing any greeting or word of welcome. “I waited at the damned gate for twenty minutes. When the last transfer bus arrived without you, I even asked passport control to check the passenger manifest, but they said you’d already passed through. Where the hell were you?”

“Relax, Connie. I made it, didn’t I?” Lukash answered with a conciliatory tone, holding out his hand.

“By the grace of God you did,” Prosser replied, opening the front passenger door of the station wagon. “Don’t you realize this place is crawling with Syrian and Palestinian security? Normally Headquarters never would have let you come in by way of the airport. If they hadn’t been in such a rush to get you here in time to see the division chief, you’d have had to take the boat from Cyprus. For Christ’s sake, Walt, this isn’t the Paris of the East anymore. It’s Dodge City, and the Dalton Gang is running it.”

Lukash held out his hand once again. Prosser hesitated for a fraction of a second and then took it. “Welcome to Beirut, Walt. What’s left of it, anyway.”

Lukash looked around at the potholed pavement, the scrub-covered median strip, the shattered streetlamps, and then at the scores of broken windowpanes on the second and third stories of the terminal. To the south and west, three-meter-high earthen berms littered the barren landscape as far as the eye could see, each designed to defend a Syrian antiaircraft battery from attack by Israeli fighter-bombers. Prosser was right. This was not the Beirut he had left five years ago.

“I see you two fellas are already acquainted,” Strickland observed drily. “Were you stationed together?”

“Connie and I served together in Jeddah a couple years back,” Lukash answered. “We had some tense moments at the airport back then, too, didn’t we, Connie?”

Prosser smiled faintly. “Saudi immigration officers are even denser than the Lebanese. When we exfiltrated the woman I was telling you about, Bud, I had to pose as her husband and write out an authorization for her to leave. Under Saudi law, you see, a married woman isn’t allowed to leave the country without written permission from her husband. That goes even for wives of foreigners and non-Muslims. God, you should have seen me trying to explain to the Saudis why I looked so different from the photo in the Italian passport I was carrying.”

Lukash opened the rear door of the station wagon and climbed in. Prosser and Strickland took their seats in front.

“So tell me your secret, Walt,” Prosser inquired. “How did you get through immigration so quickly?”

“Oh, dumb luck, I suppose. I was the only passenger traveling first class, so the senior air hostess offered me a lift to the terminal in the crew’s minibus. I went straight to the head of the line reserved for diplomats and air crews and waltzed right through.”

“And how did you swing first class?”

“Diplomatic discount. Middle East knocks off fifty percent. But you have to know to ask for it.”

The station wagon reached the end of the access road and turned left onto rue Gamal Abdel Nasser, better known as Airport Road. A hundred meters farther, Strickland brought the wagon to an abrupt halt alongside a shoulder-high sandbag enclosure. A similar structure stood on the opposite shoulder of the road fifty meters ahead. Between the two, a pair of desert-tan armored personnel carriers squatted in opposite directions astride the road, their swivel-mounted heavy machine guns trained on approaching traffic.

A dark-eyed Syrian soldier whose age could have been anything between eighteen and thirty reached out with his left hand for Strickland’s diplomatic identity card while keeping his right on the pistol grip of the Kalashnikov carbine slung over one shoulder. Judging from the Syrian’s red beret and the paratrooper’s wings pinned to his camouflage tunic, Lukash guessed that he belonged to a Special Forces unit. He handed forward his diplomatic passport for Strickland to offer the sentry.

The Syrian returned the card with a smile that revealed two even rows of gleaming white teeth set off against a bushy black mustache. With his enormous dark eyes, long straight nose, and ruddy complexion, the man was handsome enough to make it in the movies, Lukash thought—a young Omar Sharif. But, then, there were so many like him in Beirut—Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians, Armenians, Egyptians, Kurds. Nowhere else had he seen such a uniformly high standard of masculine good looks. What a pity the women were not so amply favored. While Lebanese girls were often pretty enough in their teens, they soon ran to fat and by twenty-five rarely merited a second look. It was hardly fair, but, then, Lukash had stopped expecting fairness from life long ago.

The Syrian dismissed Strickland’s offer of the additional two identity cards with a desultory rearward tilt of the head and click of the tongue, a Levantine gesture that meant everything from “no thanks” to “you must be out of your mind.” “
Ahlan wa sahlan. Bienvenue á Liban,
” he said as he waved them through the checkpoint.

“One down, five checkpoints to go,” Strickland commented nervously when the sandbag enclosure was thirty or forty meters behind them.

“The checkpoint industry was still in its infancy when I left here,” Lukash observed. “Mostly straight Muslim-against-Christian stuff. It wasn’t so bad for Westerners then, but you could never be quite sure they wouldn’t just line everybody up against the wall and fire away.”

“You still can’t be sure,” Prosser added with a note of sourness returning to his voice. “By the way, Headquarters warned us about your cover having been compromised to Syrian intelligence awhile back. If the dirtballs had enough sense to watch-list you, they could grab you at one of these checkpoints and have you moved into a Damascus dungeon in the same time it would take Bud and me to drive back to the embassy and fire off a cable to Headquarters. Which, of course, is why Ed sent us to pick you up instead of sending Emile.”

“Well, I do appreciate your taking the trouble,” Lukash added with a tinge of irony. “Once I cross over into East Beirut and settle in with the Phalange, I don’t expect to be seeing this side of town again. Unless, of course, the Lebs suddenly stop feuding and the Syrian army withdraws to the frontier.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Prosser answered.

“I don’t know what route you usually take between the airport and the embassy, but would you mind if we took the coastal road?” Lukash asked. “I’d like to get an idea of the changes since I left five years ago.”

“Sure,” Strickland said. “We’ll be turning left at Airport Circle, and then it will only be a mile or so to the coast. No problem at all.”

They came across another Syrian checkpoint at Airport Circle, but the sentry spotted the diplomatic license plates from a distance and waved them through. All along the way Lukash noticed antiaircraft emplacements dug in behind bulldozed walls of earth and rubble. The place resembled nothing so much as a vast, untidy landfill, complete with the abandoned hulks of wrecked cars and trucks, mounds of discarded tires, and scattered heaps of refuse.

Wherever he looked Lukash could see the aftereffects of warfare: craters in the asphalt road, black-rimmed entry holes the size of softballs in the sides of apartment buildings, and starburst-shaped blast marks where grenades and shells had detonated but failed to penetrate. Yet most of the damaged buildings still seemed to be occupied, whether they had been repaired or not. Where else could people go? Who in his right mind would put capital at risk constructing a new building in a country that was perpetually at war?

“Heads up, guys,” Strickland called out. “We may have some trouble up ahead. Check out the roadblock by the entrance to the Sabra refugee camp. Some cars look like they’ve been ordered to pull over.”

“Let me do the talking,” Prosser replied. “Don’t do anything unless I say so, or unless they hold a gun to your head. Unfortunately, Fatah sentries don’t give a rat’s ass about diplomatic immunity.”

The station wagon took its place behind a half dozen cars queuing at the checkpoint. The sentry post, a crude structure fashioned out of cinder blocks and topped with a corrugated metal roof, sprawled across the full ten-meter width of the median strip, with waist-high walls of sandbags lining both curbs. Only the weed-infested shoulder remained unobstructed.

Twenty or thirty meters ahead, Lukash spotted a couple of boxy Fiat four-door sedans parked well off the shoulder of the road against the high cinder-block wall that surrounded the refugee camp. He watched as a pair of Palestinian militiamen undertook a painstaking search of each vehicle while a third militiaman held the occupants at gunpoint from several paces away.

A helmetless teenager in a green-and-brown-camouflage tunic and mismatched olive drab trousers blocked the Chevy station wagon’s progress twenty meters from the sentry post. Lukash saw in the dim light that the teenager’s hair was dirty and unkempt and that his uniform appeared to be coated with a layer of fine dust. As soon as the vehicle stopped, the boy took Strickland’s proffered diplomatic identity card and stared at it blankly as if unable to read it. Strickland looked past him indifferently, offering no assistance.

“Document—for the others,” the teenage militiaman barked in Arabic. Then he held out his hand.
 

Lukash guessed that the boy hoped the other men’s identity documents might somehow be easier to read than Strickland’s. At Prosser’s nod, Strickland handed over Prosser’s identity card and Lukash’s diplomatic passport.

While Prosser and Strickland tried to read the facial expressions of the teenage sentry, Lukash watched from the backseat as another pair of sentries waved down a red Alfa Romeo sedan following directly behind the embassy station wagon. The older of the two sentries, who might have been thirty or thirty-five, examined the identity cards of the smart-looking young Arab couple in the Alfa while his younger partner covered them with his rifle.

Suddenly the older sentry’s face exploded with rage. He began screaming at the couple to get out of the car and gestured menacingly with the muzzle of his rifle for them to put their hands up. As soon as they had done so, the older sentry called out to a third militiaman, who leaped past the couple into the driver’s seat and put the Alfa into gear. With a loaded Kalashnikov at their backs and their hands in the air, the couple watched helplessly as their shining new car lurched forward along the shoulder of the road toward the entrance to the refugee camp.

The sports car’s owner, a clean-shaven Arab of about twenty-five in a stylish suede jacket over baggy gray flannel trousers, set off at a run after the Alfa but was tackled from the side and brought down by the militiaman stationed farthest forward. The dazed civilian scrambled to his feet, only to be felled once more when the rifle butt of yet another militiaman slammed squarely between his shoulder blades. As the attacker drew his foot back, intending to deliver a savage kick to the downed man’s ribs, the Alfa owner’s girlfriend seized the attacker’s arm and tried to throw him off balance. She succeeded for an instant before the militiaman knocked her down with a vicious elbow thrust to the side of her head.
 

When Lukash saw the enraged militiaman raise his foot high over the head of the young Lebanese man, he could stand it no longer. He flung the door open. “Stop! Leave them!” he shouted in Arabic and began to climb out of the car.

He still had one foot inside the station wagon when he felt Prosser grasp his left arm in both hands and yank hard, pulling him off balance and back onto the seat. “Close that door and get back in here!” Prosser hissed. Then, turning toward Strickland, he barked, “Damn it, Bud, step on it!”

Lukash found the asphalt once more with his right foot and twisted his torso violently to break Prosser’s grip. He succeeded, but in doing so he lost his balance a second time when the station wagon pitched forward and threw him back into his seat. The door slammed shut by its own weight as the station wagon accelerated away from the roadblock as fast as its sluggish engine would carry it. A moment later the scene of the struggle over the Alfa was already receding from view, with the well-dressed young Arab and his girlfriend left at the mercy of the Palestinians.

“What the hell did you think you were you doing back there?” Prosser demanded angrily as soon as they were out of small-arms range.

“I don’t care whose list my name may be on,” Lukash answered with cold fury. “I won’t pretend to look the other way when someone is being beaten half to death right under my nose.”

Lukash knew as soon as he spoke that his statement was not quite true. He had seen men beaten before without intervening. They were never his own prisoners, of course, and it was never in his own country that such things happened. But neither was this. For some reason he could not explain, he had seen it differently this time.