Bride of a Bygone War (3 page)

“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 Prosser’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

“Welcome to Lebanon, Walter,” Ambassador Ravenel said, greeting him warmly and rising slowly from his chair to shake his hand. “I understand that you and Ed know each other from your earlier postings here. If I recall correctly, you completed your Arabic-language training at the embassy’s language institute before it was evacuated to Tunis.”

“Yes, sir, I learned Arabic in Beirut, but not at the language institute. I was under nonofficial cover then and studied with private tutors. Back in those days I was under instructions to avoid the embassy. Except for contact with Ed, that is.” He nodded toward Pirelli. “Ed was my inside supervisor.”

Pirelli seized Lukash’s hand with genuine enthusiasm. “It’s terrific to have you back, Walt,” he declared, pumping Lukash’s arm vigorously. “When Headquarters approved a new slot for a full-time liaison officer to the Phalange, I knew you were just the man to do it.” Pirelli turned to address the ambassador. “Walt knows the people here, he speaks the language, and he has paramilitary experience. What’s more, he’s a topflight recruiter. Nobody else they nominated even came close. As I told Tom Twombley this morning...”

Pirelli caught himself in mid-sentence and stole a glance at Ambassador Ravenel, who gazed at the two younger men with an expression of benign tolerance. He suggested by an expansive sweep of the hand that they seat themselves

“But I see I’m already getting ahead of myself. Maybe it would be better if Ambassador Ravenel explains how this whole project got off the ground.”

Lukash murmured his assent.

The ambassador cleared his throat. “Since the November elections,” he began ponderously, as if reading prepared testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “the White House and the National Security Council have been taking a closer look at Lebanon in the context of the Middle East Peace Process. I cannot claim to have been privy to those deliberations, and I would be less than candid if I did not add that I have serious reservations about some of the conclusions that have been reached. Nonetheless, for the present, the new administration seems intent on taking a different approach toward Lebanon and to focus greater attention on the Christian side of the equation here.

“There is a perception in certain circles of the new administration that, if properly nurtured, the leaders of the Phalange Party might be coaxed—perhaps bribed is a better word—into taking a more moderate position toward their Muslim countrymen. The hope in these circles is that a newly unified Lebanese state might be forged out of the remnants of the old one, which appears close to collapse. The foundation of the new Lebanese state would rest upon substantial political concessions toward the non-Christian elements—along with economic and military guarantees for the Christians, of course. The obvious drawback of such a scheme is that Syria would likely come to play a leading role in the new Lebanese state; thirty thousand Syrian occupation troops would give Damascus a very strong voice at any form of Lebanese constitutional convention.