Bride of a Bygone War (31 page)

“Yes, if you don’t mind. I’ll wait here.”

Lukash propped his rifle against the side of the Land Rover and climbed into the backseat. Then he sorted through the gear that he had spread out there so that it would be within easy reach of the two front seats. “The LAW is missing,” he called out from inside.

“Only the LAW?”

“Yes. The rifle magazines, grenade launcher, grenades, and the other items are exactly as I left them.”

Elie stepped up close to the Land Rover and once again spoke softly to avoid being overheard. “Fadi insists on having all three of the LAWs in the third Land Rover. He says he will need them if we are attacked, because as security officer he is responsible for engaging the enemy while the rest of us withdraw.” From the tone of Elie’s voice, Lukash could tell that he was not persuaded by the argument.

“I should think the LAWs would be better positioned in the point vehicle,” Lukash answered. “If Syrian troops take us by surprise as we make our approach, they’ll be firing from below, in the wadi. And if we beat a retreat, the point vehicle is the one that will have to stay behind while the other two Rovers climb out of the valley in reverse. There’s no way anyone’s going to turn around or pass anyone else on that goat track.”

“That is precisely what I told him. But Fadi refuses to listen. He insisted that Colonel Faris has given him complete authority over security for the mission and that he knows more about firefights than any of us.”

“So what then?”

“I told him to bring me the LAW or I would order him to stay behind at the hut. Then I asked him why he never told you that your embassy was trying to reach you on the telephone. He denied that he ever spoke to someone from your embassy. It was a lie—and a stupid one, at that. Fadi’s behavior troubles me. I feel I can no longer trust him on this mission. Yet I fear that if there is trouble with him, the other fighters may take his side—Lieutenant Ilyas and the two in the lead vehicle are his handpicked men.”

“So what do you propose we do?”

“We go forward, with Fadi or without him. And we watch.”

Lukash gave a quick look through the windshield, reached down, and slowly pulled the leather flap of his holster away from the GI .45. “Don’t turn around now,” he said to Elie, “but your man is coming toward us with a LAW under his shoulder.”

If Captain Fadi had been at all disconcerted by his earlier exchange with Elie, there was no sign of it in his expression. He exuded brash confidence, as he had all evening. “
Tfaddal,
” he said as he extended the thick brown tube toward Elie. His grin seemed to mock them. “If you desire it, it is yours.”

“What about the point men? Did you return theirs, too?”

“They do not desire it. Why? Would you like a second LAW?”

“Give it back to them anyway,” Elie commanded.

“So, my friend. I see you do not trust me in this. That saddens me, because I have always thought that you and I were much alike. Now, it seems, you prefer the company of foreigners who hold their noses in the air because they disapprove of our methods and cannot abide the smell of goats. As you wish, Elie. You have made your choice. Come, let us give these Syrian devils their due and settle our differences on our return to Beirut.”

Fadi tossed the metal tube in the air and Lukash caught it by its webbed shoulder strap. Elie said nothing as Fadi walked past them and took his place in the passenger seat of the third Land Rover.

“
Yalla, shabab
!” Elie shouted to the point men as he handed up the two M-16s to Lukash. Then the major climbed in, turned on the ignition, and followed the lead Land Rover up the hill.

They drove for a quarter of an hour before either man spoke again.

“It’s no use. I have been trying to think of—”

Lukash laid a hand on Elie’s shoulder to silence him and then took the pencil from the clipboard at his feet, scribbling a short message in large block letters barely visible in the moonlight.

“FADI CAN HEAR US. LIVE RADIO? ”

Elie motioned for the clipboard and wrote with one hand while Lukash held the board steady. “PERHAPS. I HEARD WHAT HE SAID ABOUT YOU AND GOATS.”

“HE ALSO SPOKE OF ANISE. HOW LIKELY IS THAT?”

Elie frowned and gestured for the clipboard again. “OPEN THE LAW. IF TROUBLE, HIT FADI’S ROVER FIRST.”

Lukash felt instinctively for his pistol and then for the two grenades in his parka pockets. He removed two more grenades from the grenade belt at his feet and tucked one in each of Elie’s cargo pockets.

“
Merci, ktiir,
” Elie said with a grim smile.

The incline was less steep now. Around the next bend Lukash saw the road widen as it emerged onto a shelf fifty meters wide, crossed a shallow ravine over a double-pylon concrete bridge, and then continued through a similar shelf a hundred meters farther on before starting the final descent toward the Wadi Chakroub.

Lukash watched the bearded point man mount the bridge on foot, examine it closely for telltale wires or explosive charges, and then wave his partner in the first Land Rover across. By now Elie and Lukash had traveled a quarter of the length of the first shelf. In the side-view mirror, Lukash spotted the third Rover coming around the bend behind them. They stopped, and the Rover stopped a few dozen meters behind them.

The point man, still on foot, waved to Elie and they advanced again. Ahead of them the point man directed his partner in the first Land Rover to back into the deep shadow of a small canyon on the far side of the bridge and turn around. As Elie’s Rover crossed the bridge and drove onto the second shelf, they were directed into the canyon to do the same.

As a result, the first two Rovers were soon pointed back up the hill while Fadi’s third Rover remained above them facing downward on the western side of the bridge, parked behind a rocky outcropping that largely hid it from view of the road and valley below.

“Now we wait,” Elie said.

Lukash looked at the luminous dial on his wristwatch and said nothing. It was a quarter before one. He looked out the window in time to see one of the point men take up position behind a boulder at the far edge of the shelf and flash his infrared signal down into the Wadi Chakroub.

It seemed like an eternity before Lukash heard the muffled whine of the first snowmobile. It started as a barely audible drone, then grew in volume and before long added the crunch of treads breaking up crusted snow. A moment later the tracked vehicle appeared around a switchback and the point man waved it into the shadowy canyon. The second snowmobile arrived a few seconds later and followed the tracks of the first to the tailgate of Elie’s Land Rover. The snowmobiles were painted entirely in white, and the three men who rode them wore white camouflage snowsuits, doubtless also provided by the resourceful Phalangists of Zahlé.

The officer who had identified himself to Conrad Prosser as Syrian air force lieutenant Mazen Barghouti, and who had later negotiated with the Phalange over the terms of the equipment transfer, was the first of the three Syrian oppositionists to step forward.

“We lost one of the snow machines,” he said in Arabic, dispensing with the usual greetings and formalities. “Engine trouble in the wadi a couple of kilometers from here. We shall have to take all that we can on two machines. Come—let us put the heavier pieces behind the first sled, as its machine has only one rider. If all else fails, it is the sled that must get through.”

“How was the trip, Lieutenant? Did you run into any of your countrymen?” Elie asked.

The lieutenant shook his head soberly. “No tracks, no lights, no noises, no nothing,” he announced. “Perhaps we should have seen more. But…we are here.”

“Those machines of yours are quieter than I expected,” Elie remarked. “I doubt any sentry would hear you in this wind unless you passed close enough to kick snow in his face. Now, can I offer your men some hot coffee or tea?”

“That would be very kind of you. We are airplane pilots, not alpinists. I believe I have never been so cold in my life.” He stomped his feet and slapped his hands together inside gigantic white mittens.

Elie reached under the driver’s seat of the Land Rover and brought out a metal thermos. He poured the cup two-thirds full and handed it to the lieutenant, who passed it to his two companions before taking a sip.

“All right,” Elie declared, “let’s pack the sleds and put these men back on the path they came from.”

While the Syrians looked on, the three Lebanese and the American worked quickly to arrange the load on the sleds behind both snowmobiles so that neither was overburdened or in danger of overturning on a sharp curve. The entire loading process took less than fifteen minutes. It was shortly after one o’clock in the morning.

“As soon as you drop out of sight around that first curve, we will start back up the mountain,” Elie told the lieutenant. “When we get back to the main road, we will watch the valley until dawn to be sure that you have made it across. May Allah be with you on your journey, Lieutenant.”

The two men embraced, and then each Syrian embraced each Phalangist in turn, including Lukash. As Elie had promised, the two Land Rovers remained in place until the point man saw the second snowmobile disappear from view. With that, the point men took their places in the first Land Rover and led the way back across the bridge.

Moments later a flash of light directly ahead drew Lukash’s attention, and in the next instant he saw the Land Rover draw a lazy arc through the air and land on its side twenty meters to the left of the road, near the eastern edge of the shelf, its undercarriage ablaze. A split second later the shock wave of the explosion sent rocks, dust, and slivers of shrapnel against the windshield of his own Rover, turning its safety glass suddenly white with a thousand minute cracks.

Before Lukash could respond, Elie had whipped the steering wheel around sharply to the left and sent the Land Rover charging down the shoulder of the road into the shallow ravine beneath the bridge in search of a place where it was shallow enough to cross. Thirty yards farther on, the vehicle swung violently away from the stream, then back again, and charged across the shallow streambed. For a fleeting moment Lukash felt the earth drop out from under him. The worn-out shock absorbers bottomed out and the Rover pitched and bucked, but it kept moving forward through the slush and rotten ice. A moment later, its forward momentum by no means spent, it clawed its way up the opposite bank and onto an access road that led up to the western bridgehead.

Lukash and Major Elie looked back to the east across the bridge at the flaming hulk of the first Land Rover and stared open-mouthed at the glowing red tracer bullets still pouring into the wreck from machine guns hidden in the hills above them to the north and east. Minutes later, as they examined the wreck from the relative protection of a massive boulder, it seemed impossible to Lukash that either of the two point men could have survived the explosion, the crash, or the subsequent machine-gun fire.

Elie pulled his Land Rover back onto the main road and at once Lukash heard something resembling the distant clatter of a jackhammer, followed almost instantly by the eerie whistle of a bullet tumbling end over end as it passed them by. Now a trail of heavy machine-gun bullets raked the rock wall behind the Rover, sending rock fragments clattering against Lukash’s side of the vehicle.

“Where’s Fadi, for God’s sake?” Elie burst out. “Why isn’t he returning fire?”

Around the next bend, a hundred meters ahead of them, the third Land Rover was angled across the roadway at its narrowest point. Fadi and the driver scrambled out the doors, rifles in hand, and took up positions behind the vehicle’s engine compartment, aiming straight for Elie’s oncoming Land Rover. The rifleman on the left fired a short burst from his M-16, and the bullets crackled like firecrackers as they flew past Lukash’s open window.

“Don’t stop! Ram them! Aim your right fender for their rear wheels—it’ll swing them around. Faster!” Lukash screamed.

“It’s too narrow!” Elie shouted back as he reached across the steering wheel with his left hand and seized the hand brake with his right. In a single movement, he spun the wheel violently around and jerked up on the hand brake so that the Rover spun around and showed its rear end to the two gunmen. As the Rover’s rearward momentum slowed, Elie shifted into first gear and headed back downhill toward the bridge.

“We must find cover,” he told Lukash. “When we stop, take up your rifle and follow me.”

One of the machine gunners on the next hill began firing regular three-round bursts that skipped along the ground to the left of the Land Rover. Elie brought the steering wheel around hard and sent the Rover skidding broadside into a mound of knee-high boulders. Lukash gathered up as many sacks of ordnance as he could hold from among those piled in the backseat and swung his legs out the door. Elie tumbled out behind him.

They had no sooner toppled forward onto the rocks than strobe-like muzzle flashes cast their flickering shadows against the snow-covered hillside behind them. An instant later a scattering of bullets hit the exposed side of the Land Rover, scattering tiny fragments of safety glass over their legs and backs. The muzzle flashes came from the direction of Fadi’s makeshift barricade, and Lukash could tell from the extremely rapid rate of fire that the bullets were being shot from a Phalangist M-16 and not from a Syrian AK-47.