Bride of a Bygone War (Beriut Trilogy 2) Read online

  “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.

  “Of all the goddamned...” Prosser heaved a sigh of exasperation, rolled his eyes, and looked toward Strickland as if for support. The technician’s face was ashen, his eyes close to bulging, and his knuckles white from the desperate grip he maintained on the steering wheel. He did not meet Pross
er’s gaze as he handed over the identity documents the sentry had returned to him.

  “In case you’ve forgotten, Walt, there’s still a civil war going on here,” Prosser continued. “People do that sort of thing to each other in wars. And if you get in their way, they just might kill you for it.”

  “Spare me the lecture, Connie. What went on back there had nothing to do with any civil war. It was armed robbery, pure and simple. If we had been able to reach their commanding officer, we might have made enough of a stink to have shaken that couple loose.”

  Prosser was unmoved. “I don’t know what you’ve been smoking down there in Amman, Walt, but if I were you, I’d lay off. And the next time you get the urge to be a hero, do us all a favor and wait till you’re alone.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later the station wagon pulled into the semicircular driveway of the American embassy, a converted apartment building at the eastern end of the Corniche road between the American University of Beirut and the sea. When Lukash had last been inside the building—just short of five years earlier—the Beirut embassy had been the largest American diplomatic mission in the Middle East. Every one of its floors had been in regular use, and a new, larger chancery building was already under construction a mile down the coast in Ramlet al-Baida.

  A hundred Americans and more than double as many Lebanese had been on the embassy’s payroll then. Now, fewer than half the embassy’s offices were in use. Two complete floors had been converted to temporary sleeping quarters for these periods—sometimes for weeks at a time—when civil unrest made it unsafe for American diplomats to remain in their apartments overnight. Another floor housed the fifteen-man Marine Security Guard detachment.

  Strickland waved to the plainclothes Lebanese guard and parked the station wagon under the porte cochère. The three men entered the embassy lobby in silence and waited for Lukash to present his diplomatic passport to the solemn-faced marine guard in the bulletproof glass enclosure.

  After quickly examining the photo and riffling through the back pages, the black marine corporal pressed the buzzer to unlock the inner door and invited the men inside. “Welcome to Beirut, Mr. Lukash,” he added, still expressionless as he handed back the passport.

  “I’d say it’s a pleasure to be here, Corporal, only I’m not sure that would be truthful,” Lukash replied as he entered.

  The three men stopped before the elevator, a tiny, wood-paneled European model barely large enough for four Americans of average size.

  “Better go on up, Walt,” Prosser said. “They’re waiting for you. I’ll be in my office if you need me.”

  Lukash entered the elevator alone. At the eighth floor the whirring stopped and the cab made a sharp bounce on the cables. He pushed open the hardwood door and entered a spacious anteroom whose far wall consisted largely of floor-to-ceiling casement windows, at either end of which a glass door opened onto a full-length terrace. Along the remaining three walls, flowered chintz easy chairs and sofas were arranged in conversational clusters. The furniture had nothing in common with the dull, earth-toned, government-issue junk that filled every other American embassy where Lukash had worked.

  A matched pair of heavy teak desks squatted side by side, dominating the center of the room. Behind the desk on the right sat a tall, full-figured woman of about forty, round-faced and plain, with limp, dishwater-blonde hair streaked with gray. She wore a loose-fitting, long-sleeved cotton print dress of a kind that had become the unofficial uniform of American embassy wives in Jeddah and Riyadh. The loose cut and thin fabric made it as comfortable as the Bedouins’ billowing white jalabiyyas in the simmering summer heat, while the long sleeves and ankle-length hemline had the added advantage of not offending traditional Muslim sensibilities.

  There hadn’t been many conservative Muslims in Beirut five years ago, Lukash thought—at least none in those days whose sensibilities had to be reckoned with. He wondered whether conservative dress was the product of an Islamic rebirth in post–civil war Beirut or whether the ambassador’s secretary had simply conformed to the wash-and-wear style of so many State Department officials who had spent the better part of their careers in Third World capitals where dry cleaning was not an option.

  “Ah, Mr. Lukash,” she began with the condescending smile and omniscient tone of voice of someone who handled every piece of paper that crossed the ambassador’s desk. “It’s so good to have you with us. The ambassador was quite concerned about your safety at the airport. I’ll ring him right now to let him know you’re here.”

  She picked up the receiver and punched a red button at the base of the telephone to engage the intercom. “Walter Lukash is here, Mr. Ambassador. Shall I send him in?” She gave Lukash a patronizing smile, as if she had done him a favor for which he should remain forever in her debt. “Yes, Mr. Ambassador. I’ve already phoned the dispatcher. I’ll let you know as soon as your car is ready.” She deposited the receiver gingerly in its cradle, then she looked up at Lukash and blinked twice, as if in surprise that he had not instantly followed her cue to go in.

  “Excuse me, but I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name, Miss...”

  “Oh, call me Muriel. There’s no point in being formal. We all get to be on close terms rather quickly here. In fact, this embassy is more like a family than any other post I’ve known—and that’s eighteen years in the department speaking. But, then, there’s nothing like a common danger to bring people together. Don’t you think so?”

  Lukash smiled amiably, but his eyes held a distant look. As she spoke his thoughts had turned inward, returning to the morning exactly a week before when he had been handed a one-paragraph cable ordering him to proceed at once to Beirut rather than serve out the last two months of his tour of duty in Amman. It had been a back-channel message from the chief of the Near East Division in the Directorate of Operations, who was now on the first leg of his semiannual inspection tour of Middle Eastern stations. The cable offered no specifics except that Lukash’s month of home leave had been canceled and his reassignment to Headquarters as chief of the Palestinian desk was postponed for two months. Lukash was to proceed to Beirut by the fastest available means so that he could meet with the division chief there before the latter’s departure for Damascus on Thursday morning.

  Lukash had met the division chief only once before. He recalled a slender, rather effete man of fifty or fifty-five who stepped lightly on crepe-soled shoes and bore an odd resemblance to Mister Rogers of children’s television. Since that day, every time he thought of the chief he imagined the annoying tune “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” playing softly in the background.

  “And is Mr. Twombley with the ambassador?” he asked the secretary.

  “I’m afraid he had to leave for Damascus after lunch. A dinner meeting was scheduled there at the last minute with Ambassador Paulson.” She pushed her swivel chair back from the desk and picked up a polished steel ruler gingerly with both hands. “But if there is anything you want to bring to Mr. Twombley’s attention, I’m sure Mr. Pirelli will be able to pass it along by cable.” The intercom buzzed once more, and the cheerful, efficient mask once again came over her face. “Please, go right in.”

  Whatever the reasons had been for canceling his return to the States and sending him to Beirut, Lukash would now have to hear them from Ed Pirelli and the ambassador. And if what Strickland had said about his two-month temporary assignment having being converted into a two-year permanent assignment was true, he would now have to plead his case for a reversal before a station chief and an ambassador who each had enlarged his respective fiefdom by Lukash’s addition. If he meant to raise any objection at all, he would have to do so with some delicacy if he was to avoid poisoning the atmosphere for as long as he might be required to stay on.

  He twisted the brass doorknob and went in. Ambassador Richard W. Ravenel sat directly opposite the door in an oxblood leather easy chair, his long legs crossed and his arms extended the full length of the padded
leather armrests. In a matching leather sofa adjacent to the easy chair, gazing out dreamily across the room toward the Mediterranean, slouched Edwin Pirelli, chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Beirut Station. The contrast in appearance between the two men was telling.

  Ravenel was a tall, patrician figure with slender, bony hands and a high-domed forehead, accentuated by near-total baldness. Lukash guessed the ambassador was at least sixty, recalling that he had already been a senior career ambassador when, draping himself theatrically with an American flag, he evacuated the American staff from the roof of a tiny Southeast Asian embassy a year before the fall of Saigon. Ravenel’s face was dominated by piercing blue eyes and a long, thin mouth upturned at the corners in perpetual irony. The European lines of his elegant double-breasted navy suit and the odd, idiosyncratic hand gestures assimilated from a forty-year career spent communicating with people of foreign cultures lent the impression that Ravenel was not an American at all but a sort of composite European American, or what a Marxist might call a rootless cosmopolitan.

  Edwin Pirelli could hardly be mistaken for a cosmopolitan. His thick-soled black brogues and his pale blue drip-dry cotton suit, while admittedly handy in Third World posts where dry cleaning was nonexistent or at best unreliable, marked him indelibly as a budget-conscious American embassy functionary. Even his closely cropped black hair—lately infiltrated by gray—and his erect posture seemed to smack of government issue, his fifteen years in the Agency and four years as an Airborne Ranger during the early Vietnam era having left their imprint on him.

  Yet, as Lukash observed the ambassador and the station chief together in the moment before they acknowledged his presence, he sensed a deep rapport between the two men that he assumed was the product of their mutual dependence. The station chief, who had raised himself through the ranks by hard work and relentless self-promotion, seemed to assume that the distinguished career ambassador recognized him as a peer, or nearly so, seeking out his views and opinions on delicate matters of state in which judgment and discretion were paramount. Lukash suspected that what the ambassador relied on Pirelli to provide was merely the raw intelligence information that represented a vital source of an American chief of mission’s power. He also suspected that the ambassador manipulated Pirelli’s tender ego with as much cynical disdain as Pirelli applied in manipulating the egos of his paid foreign agents