Bride of a Bygone War (22 page)

“Anyway, when I returned from Grenoble and discovered that Muna had married a foreigner, I simply could not bring myself to believe it. It is true that I had not written to her during the year I was away, but I had always known in my heart that we would marry. And though her father knew of my intentions toward her, he did not send me so much as a word of warning about the American. Yet, as it happened, by the time I returned from France, Muna was already married and her husband had been missing for many weeks. And I was left standing by helplessly like an ass.

“That is my story. When the fighting ended in the autumn of 1976, and I was able to take up my life again, there was nothing for me to do but become like a brother to Muna and wait for her to either accept that her husband was dead or arrange an annulment. The priests could be expected to refuse, of course—since a child had been born, no one could deny that the marriage was consummated. But these things can be arranged in Lebanon if one is patient and knows the proper people.”

Major Elie continued to look straight ahead with a look of concentrated thought, as if he were at that moment deciding what to do with the remainder of his life.

“You never mentioned before that Muna had a child by the marriage,” Lukash said softly.

“Yes, but the little girl died from a car bomb two years ago, along with her grandmother, while they waited to buy bread at a bakery in Jall ed Dib. They were thrown against the rear wall of the bakery and killed instantly.

“Oh, my God,” Lukash gasped almost inaudibly.

“The Muslim boys who placed the bomb were captured within hours and confessed that an officer of Syrian military intelligence gave them the bomb. Captain Fadi and I conducted the interrogation ourselves and it was extremely thorough. But of course nothing we could do could bring back the child or César’s wife.”

The color drained from his Lukash’s face.
 

Elie went on. “Even so, Muna has always had a very strong character. She mourned the baby for two months and then went back to her job at the advertising company where she had worked since before the child was born. She spends nearly all her time there now. But even when she is not working, one hardly ever sees Muna laugh or smile as she did before the Events. She attends mass every day—something she never did before the Events. But she has not become bitter and never blames the Muslims or the Syrians or anyone else for the little girl’s death.”

They reached the end of the lift, dismounted from the T-bar, and skied a short distance to the base of a second ski lift. As before, the snow beneath their skis and everywhere else around them was pristine and untracked. The machine pulled them another fifty or sixty meters before Lukash broke the silence.

“I know it’s a sensitive subject, Elie, but can you explain to me what happened to the Chamounists yesterday at the Libramarine Club? I don’t get it. It isn’t like the fighting between Lebanese and Syrians, or even between Christian Lebanese and Muslims. I mean, how can the Phalange do something like that to other Lebanese Christians? The Chamounists no longer have any armed forces—they represent no threat to Bashir’s power. What on earth was it for?”

Elie turned away, a look of suppressed anger in his eyes. “Perhaps you should ask Commander Bashir yourself. Some are saying that what he did was designed to prove to the Americans that he is the sole leader of the Christians in Lebanon.”

“So the Americans are responsible? Is that it?” Lukash challenged.

“Forgive me. I did not intend to imply such a thing. No one is responsible but Bashir and those who carried out the operation under his orders. If I am angry, it is because César Khalifé, Muna’s father, was among those whose bodies we found floating in the swimming pool.”

“Your anger is the only reaction that a decent human being could be expected to have, Elie.”

“But I am a Phalange officer as well as a human being,” Elie replied with suppressed fury. “And I have learned that my own commanding officer, Colonel Faris, is the one who planned this butchery. I confronted him about it yesterday as soon as I returned from the Libramarine. He laughed and said I was squeamish because I was once a Chamounist. It took all my strength to control myself and not throttle him in his chair.” Elie said as he struggled to keep his bitterness in check.
 

Lukash waited a moment before breaking the silence. This was the moment he and Ed had hoped for: Elie was more than disaffected and seemed to no longer owe any loyalty at all to the Phalange. “So what do you intend to do?”

Elie’s look seemed to acknowledge the risk he was taking by giving the American a frank answer. “Lately I have been thinking about resigning my commission and emigrating. César told me a few days ago that your vice consul promised to inform him very shortly whether he was able to find any record of Muna’s husband in the United States. If there is none, I plan to ask Muna to marry me and to leave Lebanon. To France, or possibly Canada or Australia.”

“Have you considered the United States?”

Major Elie looked askance at Lukash. “I have been told such a thing is nearly impossible unless one has close relatives in America. And I have no close relatives outside of Lebanon.”

“There are other ways, Elie. If you are interested, I could look into them. All it takes is a word from you.”

“You mean, through your organization?”

“If you would like me to,” Lukash replied. “America is a rather expensive place to live. It would be smart to build up a savings fund before you went. We could help.”

“How long would it take to arrange such a savings fund, as you call it?”

“To work out an agreement? Just a few days. But, frankly speaking, it might take a year or more before you would be in a position to pick up and move, if you know what I mean. How soon were you thinking of leaving?”

“I cannot say,” Elie mused. “Such a thing depends on whether Muna would agree to come with me. I would imagine in a year, though perhaps sooner.”

“I think you and I just might be able to help each other, Elie. Come, let’s finish our work here on the summit as soon as we can so we can go down to the lodge and drink some of that brandy you bragged about.”

They rode the remaining hundred meters of the T-bar in silence, then dismounted onto a steep slope just below a ridgeline. After descending the slope, Elie pointed with his ski pole for Lukash to remove his skis and climb to the lip of the ridge. Once there, Lukash spotted a bunker-like ski hut made of reinforced concrete that lay half buried under shoulder-high drifts of snow. A pair of black electrical wires led from the top end of the ski lift to a corner of hut, just above its sliding door.

Elie reached into the zippered breast pocket of his ski jacket and removed a pair of keys. He used one to open a fist-size padlock on the door and used the second to unlock the door itself. He yanked hard on the long metal lever, but when it failed to budge, he removed an alpinist’s ice ax from his belt and used the ax to chip ice from the door’s edges. On the third try the door slipped open and Elie beckoned for Lukash to follow him inside.

Lukash shut the door behind him and felt claustrophobic for a moment on hearing the solid click of the latch reseal the insulated door. He found himself crammed into a tiny airlock vestibule with Elie where not a single ray of light could penetrate and where there was barely enough room for one man, much less two. A moment later an inner door opened and Elie switched on an overhead light. Along the far wall stood a metal rack stacked nearly from floor to ceiling with electronic equipment. Lukash, who had spent much of his two years in Saudi Arabia tending electronic eavesdropping devices, recognized the sensitive radio receivers and transmitters as American-made equipment that had been considered obsolete by the Agency for nearly a decade.

“From this location,” Elie said, “we are able to intercept Syrian military communications all over Lebanon and western Syria, and to receive clandestine radio broadcasts from our agents operating at locations in the Bekaa Valley and Damascus. The problem with our equipment is that despite all the insulation and our climate control system, the radios are not reliable in the winter months. Very shortly the colonel will request that your agency replace the radios you see here with the latest American-made models. What he fears, however, is that the new equipment you give him will also enable your technicians to capture the messages we receive from our Syrian agents. For this reason, he has asked me to show you the intercept equipment and to help you in selecting replacement equipment, but to conceal from you those systems of ours that handle agent communications. So shall we begin? You brought your notebook and camera?”

Lukash circled the metal racks and examined the equipment closely. “Ready when you are.”

Elie waved his arm as if offering the entire hut for Lukash to do with as he pleased.

“Excellent. Elie, I can sense your nest egg growing already.”

Lukash attached an electronic flash to his government-issue Pentax camera and lowered himself onto his haunches to bring the equipment on the rack’s bottom rung into focus.

A mounting roar like the sound of an approaching diesel locomotive all at once penetrated the heavily insulated walls of the hut and startled Lukash sufficiently to throw him off balance. A sort of low-level vibration electrified the air as if everything in the hut were resonating with the roar outside. Lukash had never experienced an earthquake before, but he recalled that Lebanon was indeed earthquake country. Some two thousand years earlier, an earthquake had devastated the Roman city of Baalbek, little more than one hundred kilometers to the east in the Bekaa Valley. If this was a quake, he thought, he had not picked the safest place to sit it out.

Lukash regained his balance and, out of the corner of his eye, saw Major Elie bolt out into the sunlight without bothering to close the double doors behind him. Lukash followed, and the moment his head was out in the open, he realized that the roar had been caused by an avalanche. He quickly closed the doors to the hut and followed Elie to the edge of the narrow plateau that spanned the top of the ridgeline and gazed down toward the snow-covered base hut. The avalanche had started a few dozen meters below the upper station of the ski lift, where his and Elie’s skis had sliced diagonally across a slab of newly fallen snow. The right side of the slab had apparently sheared away and started a chain reaction that spread at a forty-five-degree angle as it raced down the mountain.

“Look—there at two o’clock—they are in its path!” Elie gasped, pointing to a pair of skiers in olive drab parkas two-thirds of the way up the lower-stage ski lift. “Can’t they see it? Why don’t they escape?”

At that moment, the skiers split away from each other, and both set off obliquely across the mountain with the apparent intent of outflanking the avalanche. They crouched in racing position, heads down, hands held out before their noses, and elbows tucked into their ribs as the seething front edge of the avalanche followed them, resembling for a brief moment two surfers riding a giant wave off Oahu’s north shore. And as every wave must eventually break against the shore, the avalanche soon broke over the two skiers and carried them forward another two hundred meters before stopping barely fifty meters from the row of stone huts that lined the road.

“Come on, Elie, we’ve got to find them before the snow hardens. In a few minutes it will be like concrete down there.”

“Wait. We can see them more easily from here than down below. The snow was not so deep when it overtook them; perhaps one of them will be able to push up a baton or a leg for us to see.”

No sooner had Elie spoken than Lukash spotted a dark form burrowing out from under the scrambled snow, arms flailing wildly as if the person to whom they belonged was desperate for his next breath of air. Then forty or fifty meters farther down the hill, another dark figure encrusted with snow raised himself unsteadily to his feet.

“I see two of them now,” Lukash noted with relief. “For a moment I thought those guys were goners.”

“Imbeciles. They had orders to wait until we were finished before starting up the lift.
Yalla
, Wali, let us finish our work here and go soon. I no longer have a good feeling about this place.”

Chapter 13

The intercom buzzer sounded and Lukash rose from the dining room table to answer it.

“It’s me. Bud.”

“Come on up,” Lukash replied. “Take the stairs. The elevator isn’t working.”

Lukash returned to the table, gathered the papers that were spread out upon it, and inserted them into a zippered portfolio. He carried the portfolio to an inconspicuous end table in a dark corner of the room, unfastened a hidden latch, and lifted the top of the table to reveal a hidden compartment some three inches deep. He laid the portfolio in the compartment and latched the top shut. It was inconvenient to write his intelligence reports by hand and to not be able to keep extensive reference files, but he was getting used to it. In some ways it made his work simpler than if he were working from an office in the embassy, and simplicity was something for which he felt a powerful longing these days.

He heard Bud Strickland’s knock at the door and crossed the room to let him into the flat.

“Sorry it took me so long, old buddy,” Strickland began breathlessly. “I meant to be across the Green Line by now, but your pals over at Phalange intelligence kept me busy for two hours with their questions about radio intercepts.” He looked around the room. “Say there, I hope I’m not disturbing anything. You don’t have some Lebanese honey lined up to come over and cook you dinner, do you?”