Bride of a Bygone War (30 page)

“Exactly what did Pirelli say when you spoke to him?” Lukash asked, trying not to show his rising anxiety.

“He said nothing more than that he needed to speak to you. You and Major Elie were not here, so I gave the telephone to Captain Fadi. The second time he called, Captain Fadi was gone and so I told him the same thing Fadi told him before.”

“When was the last time Monsieur Pirelli called?”

“Maybe twenty or thirty minutes ago.”

“Do you mind if I use your phone?”

“As you wish,
siidi
,” he replied, lifting the telephone and setting it down at the far edge of the desk.”

Lukash heard it ring once, twice, and then a woman’s voice with a Virginia Tidewater accent answered. “American embassy, economic section.” As odd as it seemed, it was the sound of home and for a brief instant he sorely missed it.

“Hello? Is Ed Pirelli available?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Pirelli has stepped out of the office. May I tell him who is calling?”

“Tell him it’s Walt. Ask him to call me when he gets in. He has the number.”

“Certainly, sir.” She started to say good-bye, but he spoke first.

“I know you have rules about what you can and can’t say, but do you suppose you would be able to tell me whether Ed is somewhere around the building, or whether he’s out on an appointment? You see, I’ll be driving past the embassy before long, and I thought I might drop in if he’s likely to be back anytime soon.”

“Well, I don’t suppose I would be breaking any rules if I told you Ed left the building about a half hour ago. He didn’t say how long he would be, but he put away the papers he was working on, so I suspect it might be some time. I’m sorry, but I will make sure Mr. Pirelli sees your message as soon as he returns.”

Lukash hung up the phone. “Damn it. He’s probably on his way over here.”

“Then he is probably sitting in traffic somewhere on the other side of the port or the museum,” Major Elie added, “because all the crossing points are closed. Didn’t you hear the explosions as we were sitting down to eat? It sounded like our 155s.”

“Rats. How long do you think he could be tied up?”

“It depends,” Elie replied. “If the fighting were to end at this moment, I suppose he could be here in an hour or two.”

Lukash gritted his teeth and looked across at Major Elie as if he had a substantial favor to ask.
 

Elie saw what was coming and shook his head. “We can’t delay our departure that long. Maybe a half hour, but no more. We have to be settled in the hut by nightfall, and there are stops to make on the way.” He looked at his watch. “If you wish, we can delay until two thirty.”

Lukash strode purposefully to the casement window and opened it. He could hear the rumble of distant shellfire reverberating between the headquarters and its outbuildings. “No, forget it,” he answered. “We’ll leave at the scheduled time.”

* * *

The late afternoon sun shining in a cloudless Mediterranean sky cast a warm yellow glow across the snow-covered hills laid out before Lukash and created purplish shadows too dense for his eyes to penetrate. The trio of Land Rovers had been on the road for more than two hours and were still five kilometers short of Baskinta, a town of about seven thousand Maronite Christians perched on the south-facing slopes of the Rouaïs Mountains. While the Rovers were sure-footed beasts that never balked at steep slopes or sharp switchbacks, they were clearly not designed for the sort of quick acceleration and easy maneuverability that Lebanese mountain roads often demanded.

“After two or three kilometers, just before we enter Baskinta, there will be a benzine station on the right,” Elie said. “We will stop there. Most of us are well known in town and would attract attention if we stopped farther on to buy benzine or provisions. Across the road from the station is a small supermarket and butcher shop where Fadi can buy meat and anything else he may need for our dinner.”

“Do you mind if I leave you alone to buy the fuel?” Lukash said. “I’d like to ask Captain Fadi why he told Ed Pirelli I couldn’t be reached and why he didn’t inform me that Ed was trying to contact me.”

“I’m sure he had good reason,” Elie replied. “Maybe the old man was mistaken about what Fadi actually said. Or maybe Fadi was just being cautious. After all, if you received a telephone call at the American embassy from someone claiming to be Colonel Faris Nader, would you take him at his word?”

“Perhaps not. But he could have told me someone claiming to be Ed wanted to reach me.”

“Forget about it, Wali. It’s just your nerves. In another hour we will arrive at the hut, eat a delicious meal, and take a nap. By midnight we will be on our way to the rendezvous point, and by one o’clock our work will be done. At no time will we be outside the perimeter of our own territory. And if the Free Officers have the ill fortune to be detected by the Syrian army before they are able to reach us, we can always choose to abort the mission. That would be a setback for the Free Officers, of course, but all along the risk has been on their shoulders, not ours. So come, let us relax and have something to drink while Fadi finds us some food.”

They drove on for another two kilometers before the filling station came into view on the right. Fifty meters behind it was a sheer cliff, and across the valley to the north the S-shaped tracks of skiers were clearly visible on the slopes of Mount Zaarour. Apparently the Syrian occupiers had a few sportsmen among them. Someday, Lukash thought, when the Lebanese patched up their differences and sent the Syrians packing, he would return and ski Farayya, Faqra, Qanat Bakiche, and Zaarour, all in the same day.

On the opposite side of the highway, scarcely ten meters from the shoulder, stood a pair of low cinder-block structures whose last coat of white paint appeared to have been baked, blistered, and blown away many seasons ago. The larger structure was labeled “Supermarché” in professionally painted lettering while the other, unlit and padlocked, bore the hand-painted inscription “Baskinta Ski Center/Location de Ski.” Extending from the eastern side of the market was a concrete terrace resembling a carport with a concrete slab roof supported by two reinforced concrete pillars. Flayed carcasses of a sheep and a goat hung side by side from sturdy meat hooks attached to the roof. The hides of the animals were thrown to one side while a butcher went to work carving chunks of raw meat from the animals and tossing the chunks onto newspaper spread on the concrete floor.

“That’s Raymond Lahhoud,” Elie pointed out as they waited in the Rover for the pump attendant. “When we lived up here before the Events, my mother wouldn’t buy our meat from anyone but Raymond and, before Raymond, from his father. As a young man, Raymond learned the trade at Les Halles in Paris and bought his own food stall near the Place Riad Solh. He lost it all during the Events and came back to Baskinta.

“But lately business has been bad for everyone in the mountains. Some say Raymond is more interested in brandy than his business. My aunt refuses to buy goat from him anymore; she claims he has taken to feeding the goats grape mash from the arak distillery at Zahlé. Gives the goat an odd flavor, she says—a dreadful combination, goat and anise. Anyway, Raymond’s mutton and lamb are apparently still good; my aunt says the sheep won’t touch the grape mash.”

Lukash laughed. “I think I’ll follow your aunt’s example and pass up the goat. In Amman I lived downwind from a big herd of the filthy beasts. Now I can’t stand the taste or smell of anything connected to goats.”

Elie pulled up at the filling station while the other two Land Rovers dropped off Fadi and one of the two bearded point men at the supermarché. The gunman carried his M-16 carelessly by its pistol grip, its muzzle pointed downward and hanging only a few centimeters off the ground.

A moment later the teenage pump attendant appeared, took the key to the Rover’s locking gas cap, and began his work while Lukash climbed out and started across the highway. The American found a place to sit at the edge of the concrete terrace just as Fadi had begun to question Raymond about the relative merits of the two carcasses.

“Which is mutton and which goat?” Fadi began as he stared at the heads of the two animals and their hides a few meters away.

“This one is mutton,” Raymond answered without looking up from his work.

“Cut me a piece from the liver.”

Raymond reached a bloody hand into the abdominal cavity and pulled out a wriggling purplish mass the size of a small trout. He held it tightly in his left hand and sliced off a thumbnail-size chunk with a primitive wood-handled butcher knife and then offered the chunk to Fadi on the knife’s flat surface.

Fadi chewed it, murmured approval, and nodded to the bearded point man at his elbow. “Now a piece from the shoulder.”

Raymond shaved a thin slice of mutton from the animal’s shoulder and held out the knife once more to his customer.

“Mmmm. A young one,” he observed after tasting it. “Give me the same from the goat, then
finis
.”

Raymond scowled at the militiaman but kept his silence and offered up the slice of bloody meat.

“Ahh, very tasty. And not a hint of anise.” Fadi’s smile was full of disdain as his eyes ran quickly from the butcher to his bearded companion to Lukash. “Give me three kilos of kebab from the goat.
Vite-vite
. We will wait inside.”

Raymond glared back at Fadi, one hand steadying the suspended goat carcass and the other holding the massive knife vertically in the air. “As you wish,” he muttered with ill-concealed resentment before lifting one of the goat’s forelegs and hacking away at the surrounding bone and sinew.

Fadi pretended to ignore the butcher’s ungracious attitude and made for the entrance of the
supermarché
with the rifle-toting militiaman in tow.

Lukash decided the moment was not a good one for raising the issue of Pirelli’s telephone calls. He recrossed the highway and tried to figure out what it was about Fadi that had changed since the afternoon in the bunker along the Green Line. But all he could think of was the “Butcher of Tel al-Zaatar” stuffing the chunk of raw liver into his mouth.

* * *

The convoy reached the hut, a primitive one-room structure patterned after a Swiss mountaineering refuge, a half hour before sunset. Most of the men, including Lukash, spent the time before darkness fell gathering firewood, loading M-16 magazines, and peering over the side of the mountain at the road leading down into the Wadi Chakroub. They ate Fadi’s kebab in silence. Though the meat was tender and flavorful, Lukash had little appetite for it. All he could think of was the operation that lay ahead and his growing sense that something about it was terribly wrong.

According to the plan, shortly before midnight, an hour after the moon rose above the horizon, one of the two bearded point men would lead the way on foot down the snow-covered road while the three Land Rovers followed with headlights out. Near the base of the mountain, only two or three hundred meters above the shoulder of the wadi, they would wait for the Free Officers to arrive on snowmobiles trailing cargo sleds. The specially muffled snowmobiles belonged to Phalangist mountain warfare units based in Zahlé, a Christian enclave in the Syrian-occupied Bekaa Valley, on the eastern slopes of the Sannine Range. The snowmobiles had already been transported secretly to a staging area high in the mountains where roads were impassable from November through April.

The Free Officers would travel through nominally Syrian-held mountain valleys to the Wadi Chakroub. From there they would be guided to the rendezvous by a beam of infrared light flashed by one of Elie’s men and rendered visible by special goggles obtained from the Zahlé-based Phalangists. The radios, medical supplies, and other equipment were calculated to be easily towable on sleds by three snowmobiles, or more slowly by two machines if one were to break down. When the equipment had been safely transferred from the Land Rovers to the sleds, Elie’s team would have accomplished its mission. The team would then withdraw up the mountain to their hut, wait until dawn, cook a hearty breakfast, and return to Beirut. The Syrian Free Officers would retreat in their snowmobiles across Syrian-held terrain to Zahlé and from there smuggle their goods across the Bekaa Valley into Syria.

At midnight, Lukash slung his M-16 over his shoulder and stared at the myriad stars in the clear winter sky as the moon inched its way above the crests of the highest peaks in the Sannine Range. He felt chilled to the bone, having woken from a shallow sleep a quarter of an hour before and emerged from the hut into a moisture-laden west wind against which his woolen commando sweater and long French army parka seemed far from adequate. He consoled himself with the knowledge that the weather could be far worse than this. The wind was mild compared to what it could be during a spring blizzard in these mountains. He thought of the day he’d spent skiing with Elie on newly fallen snow two days before and recalled how bright sunny days and balmy nights also brought the risk of avalanches like the one they had seen at Qanat Bakiche. But as he felt the weight of the M-16 in his hands, his thoughts turned from nature to the man-made dangers he faced.

Elie approached from the shadow behind the stone hut and spoke in a low voice, his face close to Lukash’s ear. “Have you inspected our equipment since we arrived?” Elie asked.

“No,” Lukash answered. “Shall I run through the checklist one more time?”